Why Is the Parthenon So Famous?

The most famous building in Greece today is almost certainly the Parthenon, a spectacular temple to the Greek goddess Athena that towers atop the Athenian Akropolis and is almost universally admired for being supposedly the most “perfect” and “timeless” work of ancient Greek architecture. Some people may be surprised to learn, though, that this was not always the case.

The Parthenon did not immediately become the most famous and admired Greek temple as soon as it was built. It was certainly seen as an important temple in antiquity—one especially notable for its size, its prominent location, and its extraordinary chryselephantine cult statue of Athena, crafted by the master sculptor Pheidias. Its present-day status as the most famous of all Greek buildings, though, is the result of the events and ideological movements of the past 2,400 years of history. If post-classical history had gone differently, the Parthenon’s status might have gone to a different temple.

Background on the construction of the Parthenon

If we’re going to talk about how the Parthenon became so famous, we might as well start at the beginning, before the building we know today was even built.

In 490 BCE, Dareios I, the ruler of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, sent an invasion force to Greece, led by the generals Artaphernes and Datis, to punish the city-states of Eretria and Athens for aiding the Ionian Greek cities of Asia Minor in a major rebellion against Achaemenid rule. The Persians successfully sacked Eretria and enslaved its inhabitants. The Athenians and their allies the Plataians, however, confronted the much larger Persian force at Marathon and won an unexpected victory.

Sometime in the aftermath of this surprising victory, the Athenians began building a temple to the goddess Athena on the Akropolis where the Parthenon now stands. Modern scholars refer to this temple as the “Older Parthenon.” Although it was never finished (for reasons I will discuss in a moment), it literally laid the foundation on which the Parthenon now stands.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing column drums from the unfinished Older Parthenon that were reused in building the north wall of the Akropolis

In 480 BCE, Darius I’s son and successor, Xerxes I of the Achaemenid Empire, personally led a massive invasion of Greece—this time much larger than the one his father had sent ten years earlier, clearly intending to conquer all of Greece. Many Greek city-states, including the prominent city-state of Thebes, actually sided with the Persians, but some city-states, mainly those located in southern mainland Greece, most notably Athens and Sparta, formed an alliance to resist the Persian invasion.

In mid-to-late summer of 480 BCE, the forces of the allied Greek city-states who were resisting Achaemenid expansion simultaneously fought the Achaemenid Persians and their Greek allies in the Battle of Thermopylai on land and the Battle of Artemision at sea. The land army at Thermopylai was utterly defeated, forcing the Greek forces to fall back to the isthmus of Corinth. Although the Athenians managed to evacuate nearly everyone from their city in advance, the Achaemenid forces captured the city of Athens and utterly razed the Akropolis, destroying everything that had been built there, including the unfinished Older Parthenon.

Despite this desperate situation for the Greek allies, under the leadership of the Athenian general Themistokles, the allies managed to win a crushing naval victory in the Battle of Salamis, which turned the tide of the Greco-Persian wars. The Greek allies subsequently repulsed the Achaemenid forces out of Greece with their land victory in the Battle of Plataia and their naval victory in the Battle of Mykale in 479 BCE.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dated to c. 480 BCE or thereabouts depicting a Greek hoplite armed with a sword and a shield fighting a man dressed in stereotypical Persian national costume

The construction of the Parthenon

In 478 BCE, Athens and a large number of other Greek city-states, mainly those located on islands and in coastal areas throughout the Aegean Sea, formed the Delian League as a permanent alliance in order to fight the Persians, avenge the destruction the Persians had caused, and protect against a possible future Persian invasion.

Several Greek city-states that had helped fight the Persians—including, most notably, Sparta—did not join the Delian League. Under Athens’ leadership, the league quickly transformed into essentially an Athenian Empire, in which Athens treated its allies as essentially vassal states, forcing them to pay tribute.

Meanwhile, the Akropolis remained bare for decades until the middle of the fifth century BCE, when the politician Perikles instigated a massive project to rebuild and beautify Athens using the tribute money extracted from Athens’ vassal states. The Parthenon was built as a temple to Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, as part of this building project. Its name comes from Athena’s epithet Παρθένος (Parthénos), which means “Virgin.” The ancient Greeks gave Athena this epithet because she is said to remain a perpetual virgin.

Construction on the Parthenon lasted from 447 BCE until 432 BCE. The temple was designed by the Athenian architects Iktinos and Kallikrates. The master sculptor Pheidias, who also created the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, which is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and who is said to have been a close friend of Perikles, personally supervised the creation of the sculptures that originally decorated the building.

Pheidias also personally designed and crafted the Athena Parthenos, the cult statue of Athena that stood in the naos, or inner chamber, of the temple. This sculpture, which I discuss in greater depth in this article from January 2020, was made of wood and decorated with gold and ivory—an artistic technique known as chryselephantine—and it was actually more famous in antiquity than the building in which it was housed.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Parthenon atop the Akropolis, taken from the northeast on 12 July 2021

The Parthenon’s relative obscurity in antiquity

In antiquity, the Parthenon was certainly seen as an important temple, on account of its unusually large size, its prominent location atop the Akropolis of Athens (which was the most populous and culturally important city in mainland Greece throughout the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods), and the fact that it housed the Athena Parthenos.

Nonetheless, the Parthenon was just one of many important temples throughout the Greek world and it was far from the most famous. Even if we limit ourselves strictly to the territory that now comprises the modern nation-state of Greece, the Temple of Apollon at Delphoi and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia were both much more famous than the Parthenon and were seen as more religiously and culturally important for a variety of reasons.

During the height of the Roman Empire, the Greek author Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 CE) wrote an exhaustive travel guide to Greece known as the Description of Greece or Guide to Greece. The guide is divided into ten biblia, or rolls of papyrus, and he describes in great detail the various Greek temples, statues, monuments, and other sights worth seeing. His description of the Parthenon overall in the Guide to Greece 1.24.5–7 is frustratingly brief and focuses almost entirely on the cult statue of Athena that stood in the naos, of which Pausanias gives a remarkably detailed description.

ABOVE: Illustration from the first page of a manuscript of Pausanias’s Guide to Greece held in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, copied in around 1485, including an illustration of what the manuscript illustrator imagined Pausanias himself might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

As I discuss in my article I wrote in January 2020 about the ultimate fate of the Athena Parthenos, the original Athena Parthenos made by Pheidias was almost certainly destroyed by a fire that broke out in the naos of the Parthenon sometime shortly before 165 BCE or thereabouts. The cult statue of Athena that Pausanias saw in the naos of the Parthenon in the second century CE was most likely a replica replacement created after the original statue was destroyed.

Despite Pausanias’s remarkably detailed description of the cult statue of Athena, his description of the Parthenon as a whole contains many glaring omissions. Most notoriously, Pausanias does not even mention the now-famous Ionic frieze in Pentelic marble that once decorated the upper part of the naos of the temple, the majority of which is now held in the British Museum in London. Pausanias writes, as translated by W. H. S. Jones (with some modifications of my own to make the spellings more closely match the Greek):

“As you enter the temple that they name the Parthenon, all the sculptures you see on what is called the pediment refer to the birth of Athena, those on the rear pediment represent the contest for the land between Athena and Poseidon. The statue itself is made of ivory and gold. On the middle of her helmet is placed a likeness of the Sphinx – the tale of the Sphinx I will give when I come to my description of Boiotia – and on either side of the helmet are griffins in relief.”

“These griffins, Aristeas of Prokonnesos says in his poem, fight for the gold with the Arimaspoi beyond the Issedones. The gold which the griffins guard, he says, comes out of the earth; the Arimaspoi are men all born with one eye; griffins are beasts like lions, but with the beak and wings of an eagle. I will say no more about the griffins.”

“The statue of Athena is upright, with a tunic reaching to the feet, and on her breast the head of Medousa is worked in ivory. She holds a statue of Nike about four cubits high, and in the other hand a spear; at her feet lies a shield and near the spear is a serpent. This serpent would be Erichthonios. On the pedestal is the birth of Pandora in relief. Hesiodos and others have sung how this Pandora was the first woman; before Pandora was born there was as yet no womankind. The only portrait statue I remember seeing here is one of the emperor Hadrian, and at the entrance one of Iphikrates, who accomplished many remarkable achievements.”

This is basically all that Pausanias says about the Parthenon.

ABOVE: Nineteenth-century artistic imagining of what the east naos of the Parthenon might have looked like during a festival. This depiction is based on some archaeological and literary evidence, but some features shown here are imaginary.

The destruction of other major Greek temples

Thus, although the Parthenon was seen as an important temple in antiquity, it was not anywhere close to being seen as the preeminent tourist attraction of the entire Greek world in the way that it is today. So, what changed? How did the Parthenon go from being a landmark that a travel guide spanning ten biblia written in the second century CE only discusses for three measly paragraphs to the monument on the front cover of virtually every modern travel guide? The answer primarily lies in the Parthenon’s post-classical history.

Firstly, the Parthenon fared much better in late antiquity and the Middle Ages than many other major ancient Greek temples. The Temple of Apollon at Delphoi was partly destroyed by Christians in the 390s CE. It suffered further damage from the elements as a result of its abandonment over the course of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Today the temple lies in ruins, with only the foundations and six Doric-style columns on the far southeast end of the temple still standing.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the ruins of the Temple of Apollon at Delphoi, taken in May 2012

The Temple of Zeus at Olympia was partly destroyed by Christian vandals during the reign of Theodosios II (ruled 402 – 450 CE). The temple was further destroyed by a couple of devastating earthquakes in 522 and 551 CE. It suffered even more damage as a result of its abandonment over the course of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. It is likewise in ruins today, with only the foundation and the bottom parts of many columns still standing.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the ruins of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, taken from a ground-view in September 2016

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the ruins of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, taken in October 2020 using a drone

The survival of the Parthenon and its use as a church of the Virgin Mary

The Parthenon, by sharp contrast, not only survived the turbulent era of late antiquity more-or-less fully intact, but was actually converted into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary under her epithet “Atheniotissa” in the 590s CE. It remained in use as an important Christian church throughout the Middle Ages and it even became a cathedral. As a result of this, it remained a very important religious center and pilgrimage site. It was consequently very well maintained and even repeatedly renovated throughout the Middle Ages.

The Byzantinist Anthony Kaldellis argues persuasively in his book The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens, published by Cambridge University Press in 2009, that the Parthenon’s present-day fame owes more to its status as a Christian church to the Virgin Mary and important pilgrimage site during the Middle Ages than to its actual use as a Greek temple in antiquity.

To this day, the Parthenon is covered in graffiti, some of these graffiti were left by “pagans” in antiquity, but at least 232 graffiti left on the Parthenon by medieval Christians have been published. Most of these are prayers invoking the Virgin Mary or Jesus, including at least one graffito that addresses the Virgin Mary by the epithet Παρθένος—the very same epithet that the Greeks in antiquity gave to Athena.

ABOVE: Transcription of a graffito left on the Parthenon by a medieval Christian, addressing the Virgin Mary by the epithet Παρθένος, from the book The Parthenon: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Jenifer Neils, published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press (page 309)

As I discuss in greater depth in this article I wrote in March 2020 about the post-classical histories of famous ancient cities, in the year 1204 CE, the western European Latin Christian knights of the Fourth Crusade sacked the city of Constantinople and divided up most of the territories of the Byzantine Roman Empire amongst themselves. Athens was still a major city at this time, so they established the Dutchy of Athens, a Latin kingdom ruling the Greek regions of Attike and Boiotia.

The Byzantine Romans unexpectedly managed to recapture Constantinople in July 1261 mostly through luck, but they never regained control of Athens, which remained under the rule of the Dutchy of Athens. At some point during their rule, the Dukes of Athens constructed a large tower on the western end of the Akropolis near the Propylaia. This tower remained a major landmark of the Athenian Akropolis for hundreds of years and is conventionally known today as the “Frankish Tower.”

In 1453, the Ottoman Empire conquered the city of Constantinople, marking the end of the Byzantine Roman Empire. A few years later in 1458, the Ottomans conquered the Dutchy of Athens. In the early 1460s, the Ottomans converted the Parthenon from a Christian church into a Muslim mosque. (They even added a minaret!)

ABOVE: Painting by the Greek painter Theofilos Chatzimichail of the final battle for the city of Constantinople on 29 May 1453

The deadly explosion that destroyed much of the Parthenon

Up until this point, the ancient building of the Parthenon was more-or-less completely structurally intact. Some changes and renovations had been made since antiquity, but it still had a roof, all its walls, and most of its original decorative sculptures.

Then, in September 1687, during the Morean War between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian army laid siege to the Akropolis, which the Ottoman garrison in the city had fortified. The Ottoman garrison was using the Parthenon to store gunpowder and, on 26 September, a Venetian artillery shell struck the Parthenon, causing the gunpowder stored within to rapidly ignite and explode.

The explosion was cataclysmic. In addition to killing roughly three hundred people, it completely destroyed the naos, the roof, the eastern porch, and three of the four inner walls of the Parthenon. It also knocked over six columns on the southern side and eight on the northern side and caused many of the artworks decorating it to come crashing to the ground. The vast majority of the damage you see on the Parthenon today was caused by this explosion.

ABOVE: Illustration of the Parthenon drawn in 1688, one year after the infamous explosion, showing what the artist imagined the temple might have originally looked like

ABOVE: Painting produced in 1715 showing the ruins of the Parthenon as they appeared at the time, with a mosque built amidst the ruins

Lord Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon sculptures

As I discuss in this article I wrote in October 2020 about stolen artworks in museums, between 1801 and 1812, the Scottish aristocrat Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, removed roughly half of the sculptures from the Parthenon, including most of the Parthenon Frieze, and shipped them back to Scotland to decorate his personal mansion.

Lord Elgin maintained that he had a firman, or official decree, from the Ottoman government granting him legal permission to remove the sculptures, but he never actually produced this supposed firman and no copy of it has ever been found, despite the fact that extensive Ottoman archives from the time have survived.

Lord Elgin’s friend Reverend Philip Hunt eventually produced a putative Italian translation of the firman. This document, however, is transparently not written in the form of an official firman and it only grants Lord Elgin permission to remove “any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon.” One would have to take an extremely liberal definition of the phrase “pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon” in order to apply it to the marble sculptures that Lord Elgin removed from the Parthenon.

In any case, in 1816, a divorce settlement left Lord Elgin extremely in debt, leading him to sell all the sculptures he had taken from the Athenian Akropolis to the British government so he could use the money from the sale to settle his debts. The sculptures Lord Elgin removed from the Parthenon were soon placed in the British Museum in London, where they quickly attracted widespread attention and admiration from the British public. The sculptures remain in the British Museum to this day, although the modern Greek national government has requested that they be returned.

The sculptures Lord Elgin left behind in Athens are now held in the Akropolis Museum in Athens, which is located right next to the Akropolis itself.

ABOVE: Painting from 1819 by Archibald Archer showing the marble sculptures removed by Lord Elgin on display in a temporary room at the British Museum

The creation of the modern state of Greece

By the time all this material deterioration of the Parthenon was taking place, the population and relative importance of Athens itself had already drastically declined. By the early nineteenth century when Lord Elgin was there, it was essentially a cow town with a total population of only around 8,000 people.

Then, in February 1821, the Greek War for Independence from the Ottoman Empire broke out. Knowing that they stood little chance of success on their own, the Greek revolutionaries sought to win the support of the western imperialist powers from very early on by appealing directly to western admiration for the ancient Greeks, spinning a narrative that the civilized Christian Greek people were revolting against their barbarous Muslim Turkish oppressors and that they wanted to restore the glory of their ancient ancestors. In reality, matters were a bit more complicated, but this narrative made for compelling propaganda.

By 1826, the Greek revolutionaries seemed to have been defeated, but, in 1827, the Great Powers of Britain, France, and Russia decided to intervene in their favor. In the same year, the Greek revolutionaries officially adopted the city of Nafplio in Argolis as their capital. With support from the Great Powers, the revolutionaries won their independence from the Ottomans. The London Protocol of 1830 officially recognized Greece as an independent state.

Then, on 9 October 1831, members of the Mavromichalis family assassinated Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first governor of the First Hellenic Republic, in front of the Church of Saint Spyridon in Nafplio. Political chaos broke out and the Great Powers once again intervened. At the conference of London in 1832, representatives of Britain, France, and Russia collectively decided to make Greece a monarchy and to appoint a man from a western royal family to rule as king. They formalized this agreement through the Treaty of Constantinople later that year, making Prince Otto, the second son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the first king of the Kingdom of Greece.

In 1834, Athens was chosen as the capital city for the new Kingdom of Greece, primarily on account of its historical importance, despite the fact that, as a result of the devastation it had suffered during the War for Independence, its population had shrunk to only around 4,000 people. King Otto promptly set to work commissioning architects to expand the new capital and promoting the narrative that they were restoring Athens to its ancient glory.

ABOVE: The Entry of King Otto into Athens, painted in 1839 by the German historical painter Peter von Hess, showing the population gathered to meet the newly-arrived king of Greece in front of the Temple of Hephaistos in the Athenian Agora, with the Akropolis (showing the Parthenon and the Frankish Tower) in the background

The Parthenon as a symbol of Greek ethnic identity

In the political and cultural environment of nineteenth-century Greece, Athens in fifth century BCE became seen as the pinnacle of all Greek civilization and achievement. The Athenian monuments of the fifth century BCE became seen as the greatest monuments that the Greek nation ever produced. Greek nationalists and their western sympathizers especially glorified and mythologized the Parthenon, turning it into the defining monument of Greek national and ethnic identity.

There was such a strong determination to portray an unbroken line of continuity from classical Athens in the fifth century BCE to the Kingdom of Greece in the nineteenth century CE and to pretend like the thousands of years of history in between hadn’t happened that there was literally a movement to “purify” the Akropolis by purging it of all the buildings that had been built there since the fifth century BCE.

In 1874, none other than the ultrawealthy German businessman and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann—the same man who famously excavated the ruins of Troy—proposed and financed the total demolition of the Frankish Tower that had stood as an iconic landmark on the Athenian Akropolis for over half a millennium, deeming it an eyesore because it wasn’t from the fifth century BCE and it wasn’t “classical” enough.

This rhetoric that sees the Athenian monuments of the fifth century BCE and the Parthenon in particular as unsurpassable monuments of Greek ethnic achievement has survived well into the twenty-first century. This narrative, though, is neither timeless nor ancient; it has a history, and it has been primarily shaped by the specific political and ideological currents of the past two hundred years.

ABOVE: Photograph of the western end of the Akropolis taken in 1874, showing the Frankish Tower and the Propylaia shortly before the tower’s destruction

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the eastern façade of the Propylaia, taken on 9 October 2017, with nary a sign of the Frankish Tower to be seen