Parthenon
The Parthenon has stood on the Athenian Acropolis for more than two and a half millennia, and in that time it has been a pagan temple, a Christian church, an Islamic mosque, a gunpowder magazine, a ruin, and a cause of international dispute. Built in the 5th century BC as an act of thanksgiving for Greek victory over Persian invaders, it now draws millions of tourists each year. Its decorative sculptures are counted among the high points of classical Greek art. Yet the building's name was probably a nickname, its precise function has never been fully agreed upon, and a single Venetian mortar round in 1687 changed it forever. What was the Parthenon actually for? Who built it, and how? And why are scholars, governments, and museums still arguing about it today?
The word "Parthenon" comes from the Greek parthénos, meaning maiden, girl, or unmarried woman. The Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon suggests it may have originally referred to the "unmarried women's apartments" in a house. In the Parthenon itself, it seems to have denoted a specific room, most likely the western cella, though scholars disagree on which chamber exactly.
One theory links the name to the arrephoroi, a group of four young girls chosen each year to serve Athena by weaving a peplos presented to the goddess during the Panathenaic Festivals. Christopher Pelling takes a different view, arguing the name means the "temple of the virgin goddess", tied to the cult of Athena Parthenos. A third reading suggests the name honours maidens whose supreme sacrifice ensured the city's safety.
In 5th-century BC accounts, the building was simply called ho naos, meaning "the temple". Scholar Douglas Frame argues that "Parthenon" was only ever a nickname connected to the statue of Athena Parthenos inside, and did not appear until a century after construction. The ancient architects Iktinos and Callicrates appear to have called the building Hekatompedos, meaning "the hundred footer". According to Harpocration, that name referred not to its size but to its beauty and fine proportions. The first certain use of "Parthenon" for the entire building comes from the 4th-century BC orator Demosthenes. A 2020 study by Janric van Rookhuijzen goes further, proposing that what we now call the Parthenon was originally the Hekatompedon, and that the treasury actually named the "Parthenon" in antiquity was a different structure entirely, the west part of what is today called the Erechtheion.
Thucydides records that during the Peloponnesian War, Pericles told the Athenian people that the great statue inside the building "contained forty talents of pure gold and it was all removable", and could serve as a gold reserve if the city's survival demanded it, provided the metal was restored afterward. That single statement has shaped how scholars understand the Parthenon ever since.
Although the building looks like a temple, some scholars argue it never functioned as one in the conventional sense. The official cult of Athena Polias, the patron of Athens, was based in a different structure on the northern side of the Acropolis, closer to the Great Altar of Athena. The olive-wood cult image of Athena, which was bathed in the sea and received a new peplos in religious ceremony, was kept there, not in the Parthenon. A small shrine has been excavated within the Parthenon, but preserved ancient sources do not associate the colossal statue of Athena by Phidias with any priestess, altar, or cult name.
According to Aristotle, the building contained golden figures he described as "Victories", eight of which were melted down for coinage during the Peloponnesian War. Other Greek writers report that Persian swords and other treasures were stored inside. The opisthodomos, the back room of the cella, held the monetary contributions of the Delian League. Some scholars therefore conclude the Parthenon is better understood as a grand setting for a monumental votive statue than as a cult site.
Archaeologist Joan Breton Connelly has advanced a different reading, arguing that the building's entire sculptural programme tells a succession of genealogical narratives tracking Athenian identity through the ages. She sees a pedagogical function in the sculptures: establishing and perpetuating Athenian foundation myth, memory, values, and identity. Classicists including Mary Beard, Peter Green, and Garry Wills have questioned her thesis, but historians and archaeologists including J.J. Pollitt, Brunilde Ridgway, Nigel Spivey, Caroline Alexander, and A.E. Stallings have supported it.
Shortly after the Battle of Marathon, around 490-488 BC, Athens began constructing a sanctuary for Athena Parthenos on the site of the present Parthenon, built on a solid limestone foundation that extended and levelled the southern part of the Acropolis summit. This earlier building, called the Older or Pre-Parthenon, was still under construction when the Persians sacked the city in 480 BC and razed the Acropolis.
The existence of both the proto-Parthenon and its destruction were known from Herodotus, and the drums of its columns were visibly built into the curtain wall north of the Erechtheion. Excavations by Panagiotis Kavvadias between 1885 and 1890 revealed further physical evidence. Wilhelm Dörpfeld, then director of the German Archaeological Institute, used those findings to argue that a distinct substructure existed, which he called Parthenon I, slightly smaller than the final building and displaced to the north. He observed that this substructure consisted of two steps of Poros limestone and a top step of Karrha limestone, which was covered by the lowest step of the Periclean Parthenon.
If the original Parthenon was destroyed in 480, then the site lay as a ruin for thirty-three years before work resumed. One explanation is the oath sworn by the Greek allies before the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC, declaring that sanctuaries destroyed by the Persians would not be rebuilt. The Athenians were only released from that oath by the Peace of Callias in 450. Bert Hodge Hill later proposed the existence of a second proto-Parthenon, begun under Kimon after 468, with a stylobate he calculated at 23.51 by 66.888 metres. American archaeologist William Bell Dinsmoor rejected this view, concluding after his own study that the latest possible date for Parthenon I was no earlier than 495 BC. Dinsmoor and Dörpfeld exchanged their competing views in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1935.
Pericles initiated the great Acropolis building project when the Athenian Acropolis became the seat of the Delian League. The architects Ictinos and Callicrates began work in 447 BC. The building was substantially complete by 432 BC, though work on decorations continued until at least 431 BC.
The Parthenon was built primarily from Pentelic marble, and the quarrymen who supplied it possessed exceptional skill. They cut blocks to very specific measurements and knew how to avoid the numerous faults in the stone. Marble was worked with iron tools: picks, points, punches, chisels, and drills. A large project of this scale attracted stonemasons from far and wide, and a remarkable fact about its construction is that slaves and foreigners worked alongside Athenian citizens doing the same jobs for the same pay. Temple-building was a specialised craft, and qualified workers were scarce enough that they travelled across Greece wherever work was available.
The final design departed from mainland Doric conventions in striking ways. Standard Doric temples had six columns at each end; the Parthenon has eight, making it an octastyle temple. There are seventeen columns along each side. A ratio of 4:9 governs the proportions found throughout the elevation and in the relationship of columns to their spacing. The cella is divided into two compartments. The choice to go octastyle was driven partly by the challenge of scale: creating a larger naos while maintaining Doric proportions without disrupting their harmony required a broader structural approach, and the architects made a series of design decisions that broke with established convention to achieve both the desired size and aesthetic result.
Up close, the Parthenon turns out not to be perfectly straight. Measurements taken in the 19th century revealed a series of optical refinements. The stylobate curves upward at the centre by 10.3 cm over 70 metres, a ratio of roughly 1 in 700. The columns bulge slightly, a feature called entasis, with a ratio at the Parthenon of between 1 in 550 and 1 in 600. Columns and naos walls lean slightly inward. Corner columns are slightly displaced. Francis Penrose proposed in 1851 that these curves were made to counteract the concave appearance that silhouetted objects present to the human eye. Others have attributed the refinements to drainage, structural, or purely aesthetic intentions. Karl Bötticher believed they resulted from structural settlement; William Henry Goodyear saw them as symbolic and aesthetic choices.
The frieze of the Parthenon's entablature contained 92 metopes, 14 each on the east and west sides and 32 each on the north and south. According to the building records, the metope sculptures date to the years 446-440 BC. They were carved in high relief, a practice until then reserved for treasuries. Each side of the building depicted a different mythological conflict: the Gigantomachy on the east, the Amazonomachy on the west, the Centauromachy on the south, and scenes connected to the sack of Troy on the north. Drawings made in 1674 by Jacques Carrey recorded several south-side metopes that are now missing, showing a series of human figures whose exact subject remains disputed.
The Ionic frieze running around the exterior of the cella walls is carved in bas-relief and dates from around 443-438 BC. One long-held interpretation is that it depicts an idealised Panathenaic procession from the Dipylon Gate in the Kerameikos to the Acropolis. Joan Breton Connelly has proposed instead that the central panel above the door shows the pre-battle sacrifice of the daughter of King Erechtheus, a sacrifice that secured Athenian victory over Eumolpos and his Thracian army, with the rest of the procession representing a post-battle thanksgiving.
The two pediments that rise above the portals each once contained massive sculptural groups. According to the 2nd-century geographer Pausanias, the east pediment showed the birth of Athena and the west depicted the mythological contest between Athena and Poseidon for control of Athens. The statue of Poseidon on the west pediment was the largest sculpture there until Francesco Morosini's troops attempted to remove it in 1688, causing it to fall and break into pieces.
At the centre of the temple's naos stood the chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos sculpted by Phidias, dedicated in 439 or 438 BC. This colossal sculpture, made of gold and ivory, is now completely lost. Its appearance is known only from smaller copies, vase paintings, gems, literary descriptions, and coins. Only a small number of original sculptures from the Parthenon remain in place on the building. Most surviving pieces are divided between the Acropolis Museum in Athens and the British Museum in London. Additional fragments are held at the Louvre, the National Museum of Denmark, and the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna.
A major fire broke out in the Parthenon shortly after the middle of the 3rd century AD, destroying the roof and much of the interior. Heruli pirates sacked Athens in 276 AD, destroying most of the city's public buildings including the Parthenon. Repairs were made in the 4th century, possibly during the reign of Julian the Apostate, when a new wooden roof was installed at a steeper pitch than the original.
Theodosius II decreed in 435 AD that all pagan temples in the Eastern Roman Empire be closed. It is suggested the Parthenon's closure as a temple occurred around 481-484, on the order of Emperor Zeno. At some point in the 5th century, Athena's great cult image was looted and taken to Constantinople, where it was later destroyed, possibly during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 AD.
The Parthenon was converted into a Christian church, the Church of the Parthenos Maria or Church of the Theotokos, in the final decades of the 5th century. It was reoriented to face east, the main entrance moved to the western end, and an apse was built where the temple's pronaos had been. Icons were painted on the walls, and Christian inscriptions were carved into the columns. The building became the fourth most important Christian pilgrimage destination in the Eastern Roman Empire, after Constantinople, Ephesos, and Thessaloniki. In 1018, Emperor Basil II visited Athens after his final victory over the First Bulgarian Empire specifically to worship at the Parthenon.
In 1436, Cyriacus of Ancona became the first person since antiquity to describe the Parthenon as an ancient monument and to call it by its ancient name, having read of it in texts including that of Pausanias. He called it the "wonderful temple of the goddess Athena, a divine work of Phidias". After Ottoman forces took Athens and the Acropolis surrendered in June 1458, the Parthenon was converted to a mosque, with the apse becoming a mihrab and the earlier tower extended upward into a minaret.
On the 26th of September 1687, a Venetian mortar round fired from the Hill of Philopappos struck the Parthenon, which the Ottomans had been using as a gunpowder magazine. The explosion blew out the building's central portion. According to Greek architect and archaeologist Kornilia Chatziaslani, three of the sanctuary's four walls nearly collapsed, three-fifths of the sculptures from the frieze fell, six columns from the south side fell and eight from the north, and nothing of the roof apparently remained in place. About three hundred people were killed. One account, by the German officer Sobievolski, states that a Turkish deserter had told the Venetians exactly how the Ottomans were using the building, and that Morosini chose to fire on it anyway. In 1688 the Venetians abandoned Athens, and the Turks erected a smaller mosque within the shell of the ruins.
From 1801 to 1812, agents of Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, removed about half the surviving Parthenon sculptures and shipped them to Britain. Elgin stated he acted with the permission of the Ottoman officials who held authority over Athens at the time. The legality of his actions has been disputed ever since. In 1983, the Greek government formally asked the United Kingdom to return the sculptures held in the British Museum, and subsequently listed the dispute with UNESCO. The British Museum has consistently refused. In 2021, UNESCO called upon the UK government to resolve the issue at the intergovernmental level. Discussions between UK and Greek officials remain ongoing. Four pieces of the sculptures have been repatriated to Greece: three from the Vatican and one from a museum in Sicily.
An organised effort to preserve and restore the buildings on the Acropolis began in 1975, when the Greek government established the Committee for the Conservation of the Acropolis Monuments. The project later received funding and technical assistance from the European Union. An archaeological committee documented every remaining artefact, and architects used computer models to determine original locations. A crane was installed for moving marble blocks, designed to fold below the roofline when not in use. The last remaining slabs from the western section of the Parthenon frieze were removed from the monument in 1993, and cleaning of the remaining sculptures was completed in 2005.
In 2019, Greece's Central Archaeological Council approved a restoration of the interior cella's north wall, along with parts of others. The project will reinstate as many as 360 ancient stones and install 90 new pieces of Pentelic marble. Since the 19th century, scaffolding has encased the Parthenon's exterior in various extents; in September 2025, the scaffolding on the western side was removed temporarily. The Greek government says it intends to remove all scaffolding from the monument altogether by 2026, after restoration works are complete.
Common questions
Why was the Parthenon built?
The Parthenon was built in the 5th century BC in thanksgiving for the Greek victory over Persian invaders during the Greco-Persian Wars. Construction started in 447 BC when the Delian League was at the peak of its power, and the building was substantially completed by 432 BC.
What does the name Parthenon mean?
The name Parthenon comes from the Greek parthénos, meaning maiden, girl, or virgin woman. Scholars disagree on whether it refers to the "unmarried women's apartments" in the building, the cult of Athena Parthenos, or maidens whose sacrifice protected the city. The ancient architects appear to have called the building Hekatompedos, and the first certain use of "Parthenon" for the entire building comes from the 4th-century BC orator Demosthenes.
What happened to the Parthenon in 1687?
On the 26th of September 1687, a Venetian mortar round fired from the Hill of Philopappos struck the Parthenon, which the Ottomans had been using as a gunpowder magazine. The explosion destroyed the building's central portion, brought down six columns from the south side and eight from the north, and killed about three hundred people.
Who sculpted the statue of Athena inside the Parthenon?
The chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos inside the Parthenon was sculpted by Phidias and dedicated in 439 or 438 BC. The statue is now completely lost and is known only from copies, vase paintings, gems, literary descriptions, and coins.
Where are the Elgin Marbles now and why is there a dispute over them?
From 1801 to 1812, agents of Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, removed about half the surviving Parthenon sculptures and shipped them to Britain, where they are now held in the British Museum. In 1983, the Greek government formally asked the UK to return the sculptures, and in 2021, UNESCO called upon the UK government to resolve the issue. The British Museum has consistently refused, and discussions between UK and Greek officials are ongoing. Four pieces have been repatriated to Greece: three from the Vatican and one from a museum in Sicily.
What religions has the Parthenon served over its history?
The Parthenon began as a temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena. In the final decades of the 5th century AD it was converted into a Christian church, the Church of the Parthenos Maria. After Ottoman forces took Athens and the Acropolis surrendered in June 1458, it became a mosque. It became the fourth most important Christian pilgrimage destination in the Eastern Roman Empire before its conversion, after Constantinople, Ephesos, and Thessaloniki.
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