Parthenon
The temple of Athena Parthenos was built in the age of Pericles as a thank-offering for victory over the Persians. It is regarded as the perfection of the Doric order. No line is quite straight: the floor curves, the columns lean inwards and swell slightly, all so that the temple will look straight and alive from a distance.
Pericles pushed the project through in 447 BC, and the temple was essentially complete by 438 BC, when the cult statue was dedicated; the pediment sculptures were finished in 432 BC. The money came partly from the treasury of the Delian League, Athens’ alliance against the Persians, which was criticised even at the time. The temple was raised on the foundations of an older, unfinished temple destroyed by the Persians in 480 BC. Ictinus and Callicrates directed the construction, while Phidias was responsible for the sculptural programme and himself made Athena’s cult statue in gold and ivory. The whole building is of marble from Mount Pentelicus outside Athens, right down to the roof tiles. The blocks were laid without mortar and held together by iron clamps set in lead. The columns are made of drums ground against each other so tightly that the joints almost disappear.
The temple is surrounded by a colonnade with eight columns on the short sides and seventeen on the long sides. Inside lies the cella, divided into two rooms. In the eastern room stood the statue of Athena, framed by columns in two storeys. The western room, which gave the temple its name, served as a treasury and had four Ionic columns. The Ionic element can also be seen in the continuous frieze at the top of the cella’s outer wall, which depicts a procession, probably the Panathenaic festival. The 92 metopes show mythical battles: gods against giants, Greeks against Amazons and centaurs, and the fall of Troy. The east pediment showed the birth of Athena, the west her contest with Poseidon for Attica. The sculptures and parts of the architecture were originally painted in strong colours.
In late antiquity the temple became a church of the Virgin Mary, and after the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century a mosque, with a minaret. The temple remained almost entirely intact until 1687, when the Venetians besieged the Acropolis and a shell ignited the Ottoman powder store in the cella. The explosion tore out the middle of the building. In the early 19th century Lord Elgin took a large part of the sculptures to London, where they are displayed in the British Museum; the question of their return is still hotly debated. Since the 1970s an extensive restoration has been under way, in which older repairs with rusting iron are being replaced with titanium and new marble. The Parthenon became the foremost model of neoclassicism and has shaped everything from museums and banks to parliament buildings, in the Nordic countries too, where Doric columns long stood for reason and dignity.