The Parthenon

The Parthenon, situated on the Athenian Acropolis, was the greatest architectural achievement of Periclean Athens. Its construction, under the supervision of the great sculptor Phidias, was carried out from 447 to 432 BCE, at a time when Athenian democracy was at its height, as was Athenian creativity in such fields as art, literature, and philosophy. Designed in the elegant simplicity of the Doric style, the building was elaborately decorated with sculptural reliefs on mythical themes, including the battle of the Olympian gods with the giants, a battle of Greeks and Amazons, and a battle of Greeks and Centaurs (i.e., a series of human and divine victories over monstrous beings). This artistic programme is supposed to have made indirect reference to the historical victory of the Greeks over the invading Persian monarchs which had been finally won in 479 BCE. The building's central relief portrayed a procession in honor of Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom and patron deity of Athens; the Parthenon ("house of the virgin") was her temple.

The Parthenon has been viewed by generations of Europeans (and particularly by 19th-century Romantics) as a perfect symbol of Western democracy, humanism, and rationality. Though we think of the Parthenon as a pure white marble structure, we now know that it was originally brightly painted and ornamented with shining bronze. A recent documentary film (California Newsreel's "Black Athena") uses this surprising fact as a symbol of the way in which 20th-century historians have tried to overturn Romantic notions of Greek history: the democratic society that built the Parthenon was in fact a slave-state that collected the resources to erect its greatest monument from the subject cities of its own thinly veiled empire. [K.A.]

Last modified: Wednesday, 27-Apr-2005 14:14:53 EDT