Parthenon

The Parthenon has stood on the Acropolis of Athens for close to 2,500 years, and for most of that time it has been in use: as a temple, a treasury, a church, a mosque, and finally as a ruin under permanent restoration. A great deal of what people assume about classical architecture comes from this one building.

Historical Significance

The Parthenon was built between 447 and 432 BCE and dedicated to Athena, the patron goddess of the city. Four things about its context are worth knowing:

• It went up while Athens was at the height of both its democratic experiment and its power in the Aegean, and the scale of the project reflects both.
• It replaced an earlier temple on the same spot that the Persians had destroyed in 480 BCE, and it was read at the time as a statement about the Greek victory in those wars.
• The rear chamber, the opisthodomos, held the treasury of the Delian League — the tribute paid by Athens' allies, which also helped pay for the building itself.
• The main chamber housed a colossal chryselephantine statue of Athena, gold and ivory over a wooden core, made by the Athenian sculptor Phidias and dedicated in 439 or 438 BCE. It has not survived, and is known only from copies and ancient descriptions.

How the Parthenon Was Built

The Parthenon is a Doric temple, and much of its reputation rests on refinements that stay invisible until someone points them out.

Proportion governs the design. The stylobate measures 69.5 by 30.9 metres, and the 9:4 relationship that produces those figures recurs in the spacing of the columns and in the proportions of the elevation. The building reads as balanced rather than merely large.

The columns swell slightly towards the middle, a device called entasis, at a ratio of roughly one part in 550. The floor is not flat either: the stylobate rises about 10.3 centimetres over its 70-metre length. Both corrections counteract optical effects that would otherwise make straight lines look concave, and the curve of the platform also sheds rainwater rather than pooling it.

The material is fine-grained white Pentelic marble from Mount Pentelicus, northeast of the city. It holds a sharp edge under the chisel and takes on a warm tone as it weathers, which is why the temple changes colour through the day.

The sculptural programme — the two pediments, the metopes and the continuous inner frieze — narrated myths tied to Athena and to Athens, and is counted among the high points of Greek art.

The architects were Iktinos and Callicrates, with Phidias supervising the sculpture.

The Parthenon Through the Ages

Everything after the classical period is a sequence of conversions and accidents.

In the final decades of the 5th century CE the temple became a Christian church, the Church of the Parthenos Maria, dedicated to the Virgin. Ottoman forces besieged the Acropolis from 1456 and took it in 1458; some time before the end of that century the Parthenon was a mosque.

On 26 September 1687, during the Morean War, a Venetian mortar round fired from the Hill of Philopappos struck the Ottoman powder magazine stored inside the building. The explosion blew out its centre and did more damage in an instant than the previous two millennia had managed between them.

Between 1801 and 1812, agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, removed a large share of the surviving sculpture and shipped it to Britain. The Elgin Marbles have been the subject of a restitution dispute ever since.

Systematic restoration began in 1975 and continues. Much of the current work consists of undoing earlier repairs, in particular the iron clamps installed in the early twentieth century, which rusted, expanded, and split the marble they were meant to hold together.

Visiting the Parthenon Today

The temple is octastyle and peripteral: eight columns across each front, seventeen down each flank, fluted, set directly on the stylobate without bases, and finished with plain rounded capitals. That is the Doric order at its most disciplined.

Most of the sculpture is no longer on the building. What remains in place can be seen from the walkway that circles the temple; the rest is either in the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the hill or in London. The museum is worth the extra hour, because it shows the frieze at eye level and in the sequence it was carved.

From the rock the view takes in most of Athens, with the Saronic Gulf visible past Piraeus on a clear day. Early morning and the last hour before closing are the only times the summit is not crowded, and the marble underfoot is slick where it has been polished by traffic.

The Parthenon's Influence

Its proportions and its handling of the Doric order have been copied in parliaments, museums and banks for two centuries, generally as shorthand for democracy and civic seriousness — an association the building acquired long after it stopped being a temple.

European travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recorded it in journals, drawings and poems, and those drawings now count as evidence: several show sculpture that has since been lost or removed.

The dispute over the Elgin Marbles has given the Parthenon a further role in cultural diplomacy, and it turns up regularly in wider arguments about where antiquities belong.

Athens, meanwhile, has never stopped being a port. The tribute that filled the Parthenon's treasury arrived by sea, and the water it arrived on is still half an hour from the rock, which is why many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter from Athens.