The Parthenon (; ; ) is a former templeSacks, David. "Parthenon". Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World, David Sacks, Facts On File, 3rd edition, 2015. Accessed 15 July 2022. on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece, that was dedicated to the goddess Athena. Its decorative sculptures are considered some of the high points of classical Greek art, and the Parthenon is considered an enduring symbol of ancient Greece, Western civilisation, and democracy.
The Parthenon was built in the 5th century BC in thanksgiving for the Greek victory over the Persian invaders during the Greco-Persian Wars. Like most Greek temples, the Parthenon also served as the city treasury. Construction started in 447 BC when the Delian League was at the peak of its power. It was completed in 438 BC; work on the artwork and decorations continued until 432 BC. For a time, it served as the treasury of the Delian League, which later became the Athenian Empire.
In the final decade of the 6th century AD, the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. After the Ottoman conquest in the mid-15th century, it became a mosque. In the Morean War, a Venetian bomb landed on the Parthenon, which the Ottomans had used as a munitions dump, during the 1687 siege of the Acropolis. The resulting explosion severely damaged the Parthenon. From 1800 to 1803, the 7th Earl of Elgin controversially removed many of the surviving sculptures and subsequently shipped them to England where they are now known as the Elgin Marbles or Parthenon marbles. Since 1975, numerous large-scale restoration projects have been undertaken to preserve remaining artefacts and ensure its structural integrity.
Etymology The word "Parthenon" comes from the Greek () 'maiden, girl' as well as 'virgin, unmarried woman'. The Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon states that it may have referred to the "unmarried women's apartments" in a house, but that in the Parthenon it seems to have been used for a particular room of the temple. There is some debate as to which room that was. The lexicon states that this room was the western cella of the Parthenon. This has also been suggested by J.B. Bury. One theory is that the Parthenon was the room where the arrephoroi, a group of four young girls chosen to serve Athena each year, wove a peplos that was presented to Athena during Panathenaic Festivals.Jeffrey M. Hurwit. The Athenian Acropolis. (2000 Cambridge University Press), 161–163. Christopher Pelling asserts that the name "Parthenon" means the "temple of the virgin goddess", referring to the cult of Athena Parthenos that was associated with the temple. It has also been suggested that the name of the temple alludes to the maidens (), whose supreme sacrifice guaranteed the safety of the city.Whitley, The Archaeology of Ancient Greece, p. 352. In that case, the room originally known as the Parthenon could have been a part of the temple known today as the Erechtheion.François Queyrel, Le Parthénon. Un monument dans l'Histoire, Paris, Éditions Bartillat, 2020, pp. 199–200.
In 5th-century BC accounts of the building, the structure is simply called (; lit. "the temple"). Douglas Frame writes that the name "Parthenon" was a nickname related to the statue of Athena Parthenos, and only appeared a century after construction. He contends that "Athena's temple was never officially called the Parthenon and she herself most likely never had the cult title parthénos". The ancient architects Iktinos and Callicrates appear to have called the building (; lit. "the hundred footer") in their lost treatise on Athenian architecture. Harpocration wrote that some people used to call the Parthenon the "Hekatompedos", not due to its size but because of its beauty and fine proportions. The first instance in which Parthenon definitely refers to the entire building comes from the fourth century BC orator Demosthenes.Demosthenes, Against Androtion 22.13 οἱ τὰ προπύλαια καὶ τὸν παρθενῶν᾽. In the 4th century BC and later, the building was referred to as the or the as well as the Parthenon. Plutarch referred to the building during the first century AD as the .Plutarch, Pericles 13.4.
A 2020 study by Janric van Rookhuijzen supports the idea that the building known today as the Parthenon was originally called the Hekatompedon. Based on literary and historical research, he proposes that "the treasury called the Parthenon should be recognized as the west part of the building now conventionally known as the Erechtheion".
Because the Parthenon was dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena, it was sometimes called the Temple of Minerva, the Roman name for Athena, particularly during the 19th century.Encyclopædia Britannica, 1878.
was also applied to the Virgin Mary (Parthénos Maria) when the Parthenon was converted to a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the final decade of the 6th century.Freely 2004, p. 69 "Some modern writers maintain that the Parthenon was converted into a Christian sanctuary during the reign of Justinian (527–565)...But there is no evidence to support this in the ancient sources. The existing evidence suggests that the Parthenon was converted into a Christian basilica in the last decade of the sixth century."
Function
Although the Parthenon is architecturally a temple and is usually called so, some scholars have argued that it is not really a temple in the conventional sense of the word.Susan Deacy, Athena, Routledge, 2008, p. 111. A small shrine has been excavated within the building, on the site of an older sanctuary probably dedicated to Athena as a way to get closer to the goddess, but the Parthenon apparently never hosted the official cult of Athena Polias, patron of Athens. The cult image of Athena Polias, which was bathed in the sea and to which was presented the peplos, was an olive-wood xoanon, located in another temple on the northern side of the Acropolis, more closely associated with the Great Altar of Athena.Burkert, Greek Religion, Blackwell, 1985, p. 143. The High Priestess of Athena Polias supervised the city cult of Athena based in the Acropolis, and was the chief of the lesser officials, such as the plyntrides, arrephoroi and kanephoroi.Joan Breton Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece
The colossal statue of Athena by Phidias was not specifically related to any cult attested by ancient authorsMC. Hellmann, L'Architecture grecque. Architecture religieuse et funéraire, Picard, 2006, p. 118. and is not known to have inspired any religious fervour. Preserved ancient sources do not associate it with any priestess, altar or cult name.B. Nagy, "Athenian Officials on the Parthenon Frieze", AJA, Vol. 96, No. 1 (January 1992), p. 55.
According to Thucydides, during the Peloponnesian War when Sparta's forces were first preparing to invade Attica, Pericles, in an address to the Athenian people, said that the statue could be used as a gold reserve if that was necessary to preserve Athens, stressing that it "contained forty talents of pure gold and it was all removable", but adding that the gold would afterward have to be restored.Thucydides 2.13.5. Retrieved 3 August 2020. The Athenian statesman thus implies that the metal, obtained from contemporary coinage,S. Eddy, "The Gold in the Athena Parthenos", AJA, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Winter, 1977), pp. 107–111. could be used again if absolutely necessary without any impiety. According to Aristotle, the building also contained golden figures that he described as "Victories". The classicist Harris Rackham noted that eight of those figures were melted down for coinage during the Peloponnesian War. Other Greek writers have claimed that treasures such as Persian swords were also stored inside the temple. Some scholars, therefore, argue that the Parthenon should be viewed as a grand setting for a monumental votive statue rather than as a cult site.B. Holtzmann and A. Pasquier, Histoire de l'art antique : l'art grec, École du Louvre, Réunion des musées nationaux, and Documentation française, 1998, p. 177.
Archaeologist Joan Breton Connelly has argued for the coherency of the Parthenon's sculptural programme in presenting a succession of genealogical narratives that track Athenian identity through the ages: from the birth of Athena, through cosmic and epic battles, to the final great event of the Athenian Bronze Age, the war of Erechtheus and Eumolpos. She argues a pedagogical function for the Parthenon's sculptured decoration, one that establishes and perpetuates Athenian foundation myth, memory, values and identity. While some classicists, including Mary Beard, Peter Green, and Garry Wills have doubted or rejected Connelly's thesis, an increasing number of historians, archaeologists, and classical scholars support her work. They include: J.J. Pollitt, Brunilde Ridgway, Nigel Spivey, Caroline Alexander, and A. E. Stallings.
Older Parthenon
The first endeavour to build a sanctuary for Athena Parthenos on the site of the present Parthenon was begun shortly after the Battle of Marathon (–488 BC) upon a solid limestone foundation that extended and levelled the southern part of the Acropolis summit. This building replaced a Hekatompedon temple ("hundred-footer") and would have stood beside the archaic temple dedicated to Athena Polias ("of the city"). The Older or Pre-Parthenon, as it is frequently called, was still under construction when the Persians sacked the city in 480 BC and razed the Acropolis.Hurwit 2005, p. 135.
The existence of both the proto-Parthenon and its destruction were known from Herodotus,Herodotus Histories, 8.53. and the drums of its columns were visibly built into the curtain wall north of the Erechtheion. Further physical evidence of this structure was revealed with the excavations of Panagiotis Kavvadias of 1885–1890. The findings of this dig allowed Wilhelm Dörpfeld, then director of the German Archaeological Institute, to assert that there existed a distinct substructure to the original Parthenon, called Parthenon I by Dörpfeld, not immediately below the present edifice as previously assumed.W. Dörpfeld, "Der aeltere Parthenon", Ath. Mitteilungen, XVII, 1892, pp. 158–189 and W. Dörpfeld, "Die Zeit des alteren Parthenon", AM 27, 1902, pp. 379–416. Dörpfeld's observation was that the three steps of the first Parthenon consisted of two steps of Poros limestone, the same as the foundations, and a top step of Karrha limestone that was covered by the lowest step of the Periclean Parthenon. This platform was smaller and slightly to the north of the final Parthenon, indicating that it was built for a different building, now completely covered over. This picture was somewhat complicated by the publication of the final report on the 1885–1890 excavations, indicating that the substructure was contemporary with the Kimonian walls, and implying a later date for the first temple.P. Kavvadis, G. Kawerau, Die Ausgabung der Acropolis vom Jahre 1885 bis zum Jahre 1890, 1906.