49 Fun Facts About Parthenon

What were the Ottomans storing in the Parthenon when a besieging army's shell wrecked it in 1687?

Gunpowder turned one mortar hit into an explosion that blew out the building's centre; until then it had stood essentially intact for more than two thousand years.

The Parthenon was finished on the eve of which war?

The Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 BC, with the temple's last sculptures barely finished, and after 27 years of it Athens surrendered to Sparta.

Which Athenian statesman initiated the building programme that produced the Parthenon?

Pericles faced complaints about the cost; Plutarch says he offered to pay himself and put his own name on the buildings, and the assembly told him to spend freely.

The Parthenon's architects were Callicrates and which other man?

Ictinus wrote a book about the temple with a man named Carpion; the Roman architect Vitruvius lists it, but no copy survives.

Which sculptor supervised the Parthenon's construction and its sculptural decoration?

Phidias also made the huge statue of Athena inside; Plutarch says rivals of his patron later had him prosecuted, claiming he had stolen precious material meant for it.

The Parthenon's white marble was quarried near Athens on which mountain?

Mount Pentelicus marble takes on a honey-gold glow in sunlight, and today's restorers fill gaps in the temple with new blocks cut from the same mountain.

The Parthenon's west pediment showed the contest in which Athena won Athens by giving the city what?

An olive tree won her the city in the myth; Herodotus says a sacred olive on the Acropolis, burned by invaders, had put out a fresh shoot by the next day.

What does the Parthenon's seemingly flat platform actually do toward the middle of each side?

Rises: the base climbs slightly toward the centre, one of several refinements that some experts believe were meant to correct tricks of the eye.

The slight swelling of a column that tapers toward the top is known by what term?

Entasis comes from a Greek verb meaning to stretch tight, and may have been meant to make columns look stronger; the Parthenon's is so slight it is almost invisible.

The Parthenon's east pediment showed Athena being born from the head of which god?

Zeus's head was split open with an axe in the myth and Athena sprang out fully armed; the scene's central figures were removed when the temple became a church, to make room for an apse.

The word Parthenon comes from the Greek parthenos, meaning what?

Maiden was a title of Athena; the name at first meant just one room of the temple and spread to the whole building only about a century later.

The Athena Parthenos statue was chryselephantine, meaning it was made of what?

Gold and ivory covered a wooden core, ivory for the goddess's skin and gold for the rest; the statue vanished in late antiquity and may have been carried off to Constantinople.

Which historian records an Athenian leader saying the gold on Athena's statue could be removed to save the city?

Thucydides gives the figure as forty talents of pure gold, about a tonne, in a speech made as Sparta prepared to invade; every ounce was to be repaid afterwards.

The Parthenon also served as the treasury of which alliance led by Athens?

The Delian League's treasury was moved from the island of Delos to Athens, and critics charged, by Plutarch's account, that the allies' war fund was being spent on adorning the city.

The best-preserved Parthenon metopes, on the south side, show Greeks fighting which mythical creatures?

Centaurs battle Greeks on the south side, the only one of the four that early Christians did not systematically deface, which is why these panels survive best.

The Parthenon's east metopes, above the main entrance, depict which mythical battle?

Gods against Giants filled the panels over the entrance, but early Christians hacked at them so thoroughly that many of the figures can no longer be identified.

The Parthenon's 160-metre frieze is usually read as the procession of which festival?

The Panathenaia was a real festival with mortal marchers, when temple sculpture normally showed myths, which is why some scholars look for a mythical reading instead.

The Parthenon is a Doric temple, but the continuous frieze around its inner building belongs to which order?

Ionic friezes run unbroken instead of in separate panels; the Acropolis Museum now mounts this one lower than it sat on the temple, so visitors can see it properly.

Per Pausanias, the Parthenon's west pediment showed Athena's contest with which god?

Poseidon struck the Acropolis with his trident and, in the usual telling, brought forth a salt-water spring, but Athena was judged the winner and became the city's patron.

The Older Parthenon was still unfinished when which king's army burned the Acropolis in 480 BC?

Xerxes I's army burned the half-built temple along with the rest of the Acropolis, and the site lay in ruins for 33 years before work began on the Parthenon we know.

In the late sixth century AD the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church dedicated to whom?

The building was turned to face east, an apse was added, and iconoclasts mutilated the metopes on three sides.

After the Ottoman conquest of Athens in the 1450s the Parthenon became what?

A mosque it remained for some two centuries: a minaret rose at its south-west corner, and the building stayed largely intact until 1687.

Francesco Morosini, whose siege wrecked the Parthenon in 1687, went on to hold which office?

Doge of Venice from 1688, Morosini also looted the ancient marble lion of Piraeus, which still stands outside the Venetian Arsenal.

What happened when Morosini's men tried to lower sculptures from the Parthenon's west pediment?

They fell and smashed on the ground, so what the pediment once looked like is known largely from drawings made thirteen years before the siege.

Agents of which British nobleman removed about half of the Parthenon's surviving sculptures in the early 1800s?

Lord Elgin, then ambassador to the Ottoman court, said its officials had given permission; the permit survives only in an Italian translation, and what it allowed is still disputed.

In 1816 Parliament bought the Parthenon marbles for £35,000 and gave them to which institution?

The British Museum received them for about half of what the seller said their removal had cost him, after a parliamentary inquiry into how he had obtained them.

Which Romantic poet attacked the removal of the Parthenon sculptures to Britain as vandalism?

Byron mocked the removal in his bestseller Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and later died in Greece after joining its war of independence.

Greece took its demand for the return of the Parthenon marbles to which UN body in the 1980s?

UNESCO heard the demand in 1982, when culture minister Melina Mercouri, a former film star, made it at a conference in Mexico; its committee on returning cultural property later took up the case.

Which museum holds a single slab of the Parthenon frieze and one of its metopes?

The Louvre's two pieces were collected by a painter working for the French ambassador, years before the far larger removals of the early 1800s.

After a Sicilian museum sent a Parthenon fragment home to Athens, which collection followed by returning three?

The Vatican Museums had held their three pieces for two centuries; Pope Francis framed the return as a personal donation to the Orthodox Archbishop of Athens.

Athenians began an earlier Parthenon on the same spot soon after winning which battle in 490 BC?

Marathon was won in 490 BC, and the temple begun soon afterwards was still a building site when the same enemy returned ten years later and burned it.

Ancient builders coated the Parthenon's iron clamps in which metal, a step later restorers skipped?

Lead kept the ancient iron from corroding; the bare iron used in a later restoration rusted, swelled and cracked the marble, so a Greek committee set up in 1975 spent decades redoing the work.

A full-scale replica of the Parthenon stands in which American city?

Nashville, nicknamed the Athens of the South, built it as a temporary plaster showpiece for Tennessee's 1897 centennial fair, then could not bear to tear it down and rebuilt it to last.

The lost Athena Parthenos, recreated full-size in America in 1990, held which winged goddess in her right hand?

Nike, goddess of victory, stood in the original's right hand; the American copy was unveiled ungilded in 1990 and got its gold leaf only twelve years later.

The owl was Athena's bird, but which sacred creature sat beside the shield of her statue in the Parthenon?

A snake coiled by the shield; the ancient traveller Pausanias took it for Erichthonius, a legendary early king of Athens.

The Parthenon was built partly in thanksgiving for the Greek victory over which enemy?

Persia's army had burned the older temples on the Acropolis; a generation later the new one rose on the ruins, paid for, its critics charged, from a war chest collected to keep fighting that same enemy.

Which woven garment was carried in procession and presented to Athena at her great Athenian festival?

A peplos was woven for the goddess each time, but it went to an ancient wooden statue in another temple, not to the colossal one in the Parthenon.

What does Hekatompedos, an ancient name for the Parthenon, mean?

The hundred-footer probably refers to the main room, about 100 ancient feet long; the name we use today started as the label for a single chamber of the building.

The shallow vertical grooves cut into each of the Parthenon's columns are known as what?

Flutes help a shaft look more slender, and each of the Parthenon's outer columns carries twenty of them.

The Doric triglyphs and guttae are thought to be stone memories of what?

Wooden beams and pegs held up the roofs of early timber temples; on the usual theory, builders who switched to stone kept carving the beam ends and peg heads as ornament.

The Mycenaean wall around the Acropolis is described by which term for its huge stones?

Cyclopean walls got their name because later Greeks assumed that only the Cyclopes, the one-eyed giants of myth, could have lifted such massive blocks.

The Parthenon's dimensions are often wrongly claimed to follow which mathematical proportion?

The golden ratio does not survive careful measurement; the temple's main proportions come out nearer a plain 9:4.

Which animals appear most often in the Parthenon frieze's procession?

Horses dominate because riders alone fill nearly half the procession, far outnumbering the few cattle and sheep being led to sacrifice.

Which city's hilltop National Monument, an unfinished copy of the Parthenon, became known as its 'Disgrace'?

Edinburgh began the monument on Calton Hill in 1826 as a memorial to Scots killed in the Napoleonic Wars, but the money ran out three years later with only one end of the colonnade built.

In the 19th century the Parthenon was sometimes called the Temple of which Roman goddess?

Minerva was the Roman name for Athena, so Vitruvius, writing in Latin, listed the building as the Doric temple of Minerva at Athens.

Which philosopher, born in Athens around 470 BC, was a young man while the Parthenon was being built?

Socrates was the son of a stonemason, and centuries later visitors to the Acropolis gate were still shown statues of the Graces said to be his own work.

Which Grand Tour gentlemen's club sponsored Stuart and Revett's measured drawings of the Parthenon?

The Society of Dilettanti began as a London club for gentlemen who had toured Italy; the survey it backed later helped fuel the Greek Revival in European architecture.

The Parthenon shares the Acropolis with which smaller temple, famed for a porch held up by six sculpted women?

The Erechtheion housed the ancient wooden statue of Athena that received the city's main worship, something the far grander Parthenon apparently never did.

The oldest surviving drawing of the Parthenon goes back to which 15th-century traveller?

Cyriacus of Ancona came from a family of merchants and copied ancient inscriptions wherever he sailed; he recognised the church as the temple described by ancient writers and drew it.