Acropolis Buildings: The Parthenon, the Erechtheion and the Propylaea

The buildings of the Acropolis in Athens are four marble structures from the 5th century BC: the Parthenon (447–432 BC), Athena’s great temple; the Propylaea (437–432 BC), the monumental gateway; the small temple of Athena Nike; and the Erechtheion (421–406 BC) with its caryatids. They were built on Pericles’ initiative after the Persians burned the older Acropolis in 480 BC. Below the hill, beside the Athenian Agora, stands the Temple of Hephaestus, the best-preserved Doric temple in Greece.

Facts

The hill and Pericles’ building programme

The Acropolis, the “high city”, is a rock in the middle of Athens that was a stronghold and sanctuary long before the buildings we see today. In 480 BC the Persians plundered and burned the older temples. After the victory the Athenians left the ruins standing for over thirty years as a memorial of the war. In the middle of the 5th century BC, when Athens led a league of Greek city-states and had moved the league’s treasury to the city, Pericles set in motion a building programme that turned the hill into a single great sanctuary for the city’s goddess Athena.

The programme took half a century and followed a plan. One climbs from the west through the Propylaea, sees the small Temple of Athena Nike first on the right and then meets the Parthenon at an angle, so that both the length and the short side of the temple are visible at once. The Erechtheion lies on the north side of the hill, on the site of the oldest cults.

The Parthenon: Athena’s temple

The Parthenon was built in 447–432 BC by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, with Phidias responsible for the sculptures. It is a Doric temple with eight columns on the short sides and seventeen on the long sides, but inside there was an Ionic frieze running around the whole cella and showing a procession. In the cella stood Phidias’ twelve-metre-high statue of Athena in gold and ivory, which no longer exists.

The temple is known for its refinements. No line is quite straight: the floor curves slightly upwards towards the middle, the columns lean inwards and swell a little at the middle, and the corner columns are somewhat sturdier and stand closer together than the others. The distance between the centre lines of the columns is 4.30 metres, but at the corners only 3.68. The drawing of the proportions of the Parthenon below shows the measurements from modern surveys and the ratio of four to nine that recurs in the façade. How a Doric temple is constructed is shown by the temple diagram.

The Propylaea and the Temple of Athena Nike

The Propylaea, designed by Mnesicles and built in 437–432 BC, is the gateway to the Acropolis. The task was a difficult one: a monumental entrance on a steep slope. Mnesicles had two Doric façades, one towards the city and one towards the hill, framed by a passage with slender Ionic columns. The building was never entirely finished, probably because of the war with Sparta that broke out in 431 BC; the lifting bosses that were never chiselled off are still on the blocks. The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was built in 1788–1791 with the Propylaea as its model.

To the right of the gateway stands the Temple of Athena Nike on a projecting bastion. It is small and Ionic, with four columns at the front and four at the back, and was built in the 420s BC to designs attributed to Callicrates. Around the bastion ran a parapet with reliefs of victory goddesses, among them the famous Nike adjusting her sandal, today in the Acropolis Museum.

The Erechtheion and the caryatids

The Erechtheion, built in 421–406 BC, is the most unusual building on the Acropolis. It stands on uneven ground and housed several sacred places: the cult of Athena Polias with her ancient wooden image, the mark of Poseidon’s trident and the site of Athena’s olive tree. It therefore has four different sides, several floor levels and three porches instead of the simple plan of a regular temple. It is the masterpiece of the Ionic order on the Acropolis.

Best known is the Porch of the Maidens on the south side, where six female figures, caryatids, support the roof instead of columns. The figures on the site are copies. Five of the originals are in the Acropolis Museum and the sixth is in the British Museum in London.

Below the hill: the Temple of Hephaestus

Anyone who wants to see what a Doric temple looked like with its roof and columns intact should go down to Athens’ old marketplace, the Agora. There stands the Temple of Hephaestus, built at about the same time as the Parthenon for the god of the forge, Hephaestus, and for Athena, amid the city’s workshops. With six by thirteen columns it is smaller than the Parthenon, but it kept its roof because it became a church. From the hill on which it stands one looks up towards the Acropolis and can compare the two temples.

After antiquity

The buildings survived because they were given new purposes. The Parthenon became a church, later a mosque, and was used by the Ottomans as a powder magazine when Venetian troops besieged the Acropolis in 1687. A Venetian shell ignited the powder and the explosion tore open the middle of the temple. In the early 19th century the British ambassador Lord Elgin had a large part of the frieze and pediment sculptures taken to London, where they are today in the British Museum; Greece has long demanded their return.

Since the 1970s an extensive restoration has been under way in which old iron clamps that had rusted have been replaced with titanium and loose blocks put back in their places. The pale new pieces of marble stand out clearly among the old. The Acropolis Museum at the foot of the hill, designed by Bernard Tschumi and opened in 2009, shows the sculptures in a bright gallery with a view of the Parthenon. The significance of the buildings for later architecture is explained in the guides to Greek architecture and the difference between Greek and Roman architecture, and the Parthenon in the art section deals with the sculptures.

What to look for

Exercise

What are the female figures called that support the roof on one of the Erechtheion’s porches?