Parthenon: The Temple of Athena on the Acropolis

The Story of the Parthenon

In 480 BC the Persian army captured Athens and burned the temples on the Acropolis, including an earlier Parthenon that was still being built. After the Greeks drove the invaders back, the Athenians grew rich and powerful at the head of the Delian League, an alliance formed to keep Persia at bay. In the middle of the 5th century BC the statesman Pericles used that wealth, including money from the league's treasury, to launch a bold building program that would turn the sacred rock into a showcase of marble. Its centerpiece was a new temple for Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war who gave the city its name.

Work began in 447 BC and the building was essentially finished by 432 BC. The architects Ictinus and Callicrates designed it, while the sculptor Phidias oversaw the artistic program. Its white marble was hauled from Mount Pentelicus, about 16 kilometers away. Inside stood Phidias's masterpiece, the Athena Parthenos, a statue nearly 12 meters tall made of gold and ivory over a wooden core, dedicated in 438 BC. The original was lost in antiquity, but smaller Roman copies give us an idea of how it looked.

The Parthenon looks perfectly straight, yet almost none of its lines truly are. It is a Doric temple with 8 columns across each end and 17 along each side, and its builders added subtle optical refinements to make it look balanced and alive. The platform curves gently upward in the middle, the columns swell slightly as they rise and lean a little inward, and the corner columns are thicker than the rest. Together these tiny adjustments counter the way the eye bends long lines, so the temple seems to stand perfectly true.

The sculptures were just as ambitious. Ninety two carved metopes ran around the outside, showing gods battling Giants, Greeks fighting Amazons and Centaurs, and scenes from the fall of Troy. A continuous frieze about 160 meters long wrapped around the inner building, showing a grand procession usually linked to the Panathenaic festival held in Athena's honor. The east pediment showed the birth of Athena, who sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus, with the chariot of Helios rising at one corner and the horses of Selene sinking at the other. The west pediment told of the contest between Athena and Poseidon for Attica. Poseidon struck the rock and produced a spring of salt water, Athena gave the city an olive tree, and the Athenians chose the olive.

The Parthenon outlived the religion it was built for. In late antiquity it was converted into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and after the Ottoman conquest of Athens in the 15th century it became a mosque, complete with a minaret. Its worst day came in 1687, during a Venetian siege of the Acropolis led by Francesco Morosini. The Ottoman garrison was storing gunpowder inside the temple, and on 26 September a Venetian mortar shell struck it and set off a huge explosion. The blast tore out the center of the building, brought down walls and columns on both long sides and killed hundreds of people sheltering inside.

In the early 19th century, agents working for Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed around half of the surviving sculptures, including large sections of the frieze, many metopes and figures from both pediments. They were shipped to Britain and bought by the British government in 1816, and they have been displayed in the British Museum ever since. Greece has long campaigned for their return, a cause championed by the actress and culture minister Melina Mercouri in the 1980s. In 2009 the Acropolis Museum opened at the foot of the hill, and its glass topped Parthenon Gallery displays the surviving originals in Athens alongside plaster casts of the pieces in London.

Today the Parthenon is the crowning monument of the Acropolis, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. Visitors climb past the grand gateway of the Propylaea to reach the summit, where the temple rises beside the Erechtheion with its famous Caryatid porch and the small Temple of Athena Nike. You cannot walk inside the Parthenon itself, and there is often scaffolding, as careful restoration work has been underway since the 1970s. Come early in the day, wear shoes with good grip on the polished marble and take in the view across Athens to the sea. Finish with a visit to the Acropolis Museum to see the sculptures up close and complete the story.