Parthenon (447 BC): Building the Temple of Athena in Athens

The Parthenon is a marble temple dedicated to Athena Parthenos, the virgin goddess and protector of Athens, built on the Acropolis between 447 and 432 BC. Designed by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, with sculpture overseen by Phidias, it was the centrepiece of Pericles’ building programme at the height of Athenian power. Damaged but still standing after two and a half millennia, it is the best-known monument of ancient Greece.

Background: ruins and empire

The Acropolis of Athens, a rocky hill above the city, had been a fortress and sanctuary for centuries. After the victory at Marathon in 490 BC the Athenians began a great marble temple on the site, now called the Older Parthenon. It was still unfinished when the Persians captured Athens in 480 BC and burned the Acropolis.

For about thirty years the Athenians left the burned temples in ruins. Later sources claim the Greeks had sworn, before the Battle of Plataea, not to rebuild the shrines destroyed by the Persians, so that they would stand as a memorial; whether this “Oath of Plataea” is genuine is debated.

By the 450s BC Athens led the Delian League, a naval alliance whose treasury was moved to Athens in 454 BC. Fighting with Persia seems to have ended around 449 BC. Pericles, the city’s most influential politician, then proposed an ambitious building programme on the Acropolis, partly funded from league money.

Pericles’ building programme

According to Plutarch, writing about five centuries later, Pericles’ opponents protested that Athens was using the allies’ contributions to dress itself up like a vain woman with costly stones and statues. Pericles answered that as long as Athens protected the allies from Persia, it owed them no account of how the money was spent. Plutarch also says the works gave employment to large numbers of craftsmen and labourers.

The programme included the Parthenon, the monumental gateway known as the Propylaea (437–432 BC), and later the small temple of Athena Nike and the Erechtheion. The Parthenon came first and was the most ambitious.

Building the temple

Work began in 447 BC, as shown by the surviving building accounts, inscriptions in which annual boards of overseers recorded spending. The architects were Ictinus and Callicrates, while Phidias, the leading sculptor of his time, directed the artistic work.

The temple reused the foundations and some of the marble blocks of the Older Parthenon but was wider. It is a Doric peripteral temple, surrounded by a colonnade of 8 columns on each end and 17 along each side. The platform measures about 69.5 by 30.9 metres, and the columns are about 10.4 metres high. Inside, an unusual Ionic frieze ran around the top of the inner walls, and four Ionic columns supported the roof of a rear room.

Almost everything, even the roof tiles, was made of white marble from Mount Pentelicus, about 16 kilometres from Athens. The blocks were quarried, dragged by ox-cart to the city and hauled up the Acropolis, then finished in place with remarkable precision. Joints were secured with iron clamps set in lead, without mortar.

The cella (main hall) was dedicated together with Phidias’ statue of Athena at the Panathenaic festival of 438 BC. Sculptors continued working on the pediments until 432 BC, the year before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.

The refinements

The Parthenon is famous for its optical refinements. The platform is not flat but rises gently towards the centre of each side, by roughly 6 centimetres on the ends and about 11 on the long sides. The columns swell slightly in the middle (entasis), lean very slightly inward, and the corner columns are thicker and set closer to their neighbours.

Scholars still debate the purpose of these adjustments. Ancient writers such as Vitruvius believed they corrected optical illusions that make straight lines look sagging. Others think they were meant to give the building a sense of life and tension. Whatever the reason, they required extraordinary skill, since nearly every block had to be cut to a slightly different shape.

The speed of the work is equally striking. The main structure was completed in about nine years, an impressive pace for a building of this size and precision, achieved with hand tools, wooden cranes and the labour of many citizens, resident foreigners and enslaved workers.

Phidias and the sculptures

The Parthenon carried more sculpture than any other Greek temple. There were 92 metopes, carved panels above the outer columns, showing mythical battles: gods against giants on the east, Greeks against Amazons on the west, Lapiths against centaurs on the south, and probably the fall of Troy on the north.

The continuous Ionic frieze, about 160 metres long, showed a grand procession of horsemen, chariots, musicians, sacrificial animals and maidens moving towards a gathering of seated gods. Most scholars connect it with the Panathenaic procession in honour of Athena, though its exact meaning is still argued over.

The two pediments, the triangular gables at either end, held larger-than-life statues. The east pediment showed the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus; the west showed the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the patronage of Attica.

Inside stood Phidias’ statue of Athena Parthenos, about 11.5 to 12 metres tall, made of gold and ivory over a wooden core. Thucydides reports that its gold weighed 40 talents and could be removed if the city needed money. The statue is lost; it is known from ancient descriptions and small Roman copies such as the Varvakeion Athena in Athens. Phidias later created another wonder, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia.

Key people

• Pericles: The leading Athenian statesman who championed and funded the building programme.
• Ictinus: Architect of the Parthenon, later associated with the temple of Apollo at Bassae and the Hall of Mysteries at Eleusis.
• Callicrates: Co-architect of the Parthenon, also connected with the temple of Athena Nike and the Middle Long Wall.
• Phidias: Sculptor and artistic supervisor, creator of the Athena Parthenos.

Later history

In late antiquity a fire, possibly during the Herulian raid on Athens in AD 267, destroyed the roof and much of the interior, which was later repaired. Probably in the sixth century AD the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and later became the cathedral of Athens. After the Ottoman conquest of Athens in 1458 it was turned into a mosque, and a minaret was added.

The great disaster came on 26 September 1687, during the siege of the Acropolis by a Venetian army under Francesco Morosini. The Ottoman garrison had stored gunpowder inside the temple, and a Venetian mortar shell set it off. The explosion destroyed the centre of the building, toppled columns and walls, and killed around 300 people. Morosini’s men then broke several sculptures while trying to remove them.

Between 1801 and 1812, agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed about half of the surviving sculptures, including much of the frieze, 15 metopes and many pediment figures. They were sold to the British Museum in 1816. Greece has formally requested their return since 1983, and the question remains a subject of international debate.

After Greek independence, later buildings were cleared from the Acropolis. A major restoration programme began in 1975 under the Committee for the Conservation of the Acropolis Monuments. The Acropolis was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and the new Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009, displays the sculptures that remain in Athens.

Myths and facts

It is often said that the Parthenon was always pure white. In fact its sculptures and parts of the architecture were painted in strong colours, traces of which have been detected with modern imaging. The bare marble we see today is the result of weathering.

Another myth is that the Parthenon was ruined by time. It survived largely intact until 1687; most of the damage came from the gunpowder explosion, later removals and twentieth-century pollution, not from slow decay.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 490–480 BC: Work on the Older Parthenon begins after Marathon.
• 480 BC: The Persians sack the Acropolis.
• 447 BC: Construction of the Parthenon begins.
• 438 BC: Dedication of the temple and the Athena Parthenos at the Panathenaia.
• 432 BC: Sculpture of the pediments completed.
• c. 6th century AD: Conversion into a Christian church.
• 1458 onwards: Ottoman rule; the building later becomes a mosque.
• 1687, 26 September: Venetian shell ignites gunpowder; much of the temple is destroyed.
• 1801–1812: Lord Elgin’s agents remove many sculptures.
• 2009: The Acropolis Museum opens.

Why it matters

The Parthenon embodies the confidence and wealth of democratic Athens in its greatest generation, and also the imperial power that paid for it. Its proportions and sculpture have influenced architecture from Roman temples to modern parliaments, museums and banks, and its later history as church, mosque, ruin and disputed heritage mirrors the story of Europe itself.