Parthenon in Athens

The Parthenon is dedicated to the goddess Athena whom the people of Athens considered to be their patron. Remarkably, this structure, completed in 432 BC, has survived the years even while becoming a Christian church in the 6th century AD, an Ottoman mosque in the 1400s, and then was extensively damaged by an explosion during the Great Turkish War in 1687.

In 1832, Greece became an independent country. However, just 30 years earlier, the British obtained a “questionable” edict from the ruling Ottoman Sultan to study the structure and its antiquities. Subsequently, a great many of the original objects we removed and now reside in the British Museum in London. As our guide demonstrated to us, even today, this is a great matter of dispute between the Greeks and the Brits. The Greeks want their antiquities back. The Brits say, “nope.”

Pericles commissioned the renowned Greek architects Ictinus and Callicrates and the sculptor Phidias to design the Parthenon, which became the largest Doric-style temple of its time.

The structure has a rectangular floor plan and is built on a 23,000-square foot base, part of which was the limestone foundation of the Old Parthenon.

Low steps surrounded each side of the building, and a portico of Doric columns standing on a platform create a border around it. There are 46 outer columns and 19 inner columns.

The celebrated Greek statesman Pericles is credited with ordering the design and construction of the Parthenon as a temple for Athena—the goddess of wisdom, arts and literature and war—but it may not have been the first attempt to house the deity.

An earlier structure known as the Older Parthenon or Pre-Parthenon once existed on the site of the current Parthenon. Many historians believe the Older Parthenon was under construction in 480 B.C. when the Persian Empire attacked Athens and destroyed the Acropolis, although some experts dispute this theory.

Therefore, the formal elements of any Greek sanctuary are, first, the specifically sacred landscape in which it is set and, second, the buildings that are placed within it.......We must now go further to recognize that, not only were certain landscapes indeed regarded by the Greeks as holy and as expressive of specific gods, or rather as embodiments of their presence, but also that the temples and the subsidiary buildings of their sanctuaries were so formed in themselves and so placed in relation to the landscape and to each other as to enhance, develop, complement, and sometimes even to contradict, the basic meaning that was felt in the land."

Francis Penrose, a British archaeologist studying the Parthenon in 1891, suggested that the site is oriented towards the rising of the Pleiades in the constellation of Ta**us.

The historic Greeks partly inherited and partly developed an eye for certain surprisingly specific combinations of landscape features as expressive of particular holiness. This came about because of a religious tradition in which the land was not a picture but a true force which physically embodied the powers that ruled the world......All Greek architecture explores and praises the character of a god or group of gods in a specific place. That place is itself holy and, before the temple was built upon it, embodied the whole of the deity as a recognized natural force. With the coming of the temple, housing its image within it and itself developed as a sculptural embodiment of the god's presence and character, the meaning becomes double, both of the deity in nature and the god as imagined by men.

The project was to include, among other things, the Propylaea, the gateway to the sacred precinct; the Erechtheum, a shrine to the agricultural deities, especially Erichthonius; and the Temple of Athena Nike, an architectural symbol of the harmony with which the Dorian and Ionian peoples lived under the government of Athens. The Parthenon was to be the chief shrine to Athena and also the treasury of the Delian League, a confederacy of ancient Greek states under the leadership of Athens, founded in 478 BCE. According to some sources, Pericles misappropriated surplus funds from the league to pay for the new buildings.