The Parthenon was built on the Acropolis, a hill two hundred feet above
the streets of Athens, in the year 438 B.C. Not yet had the blight of
decay laid its hand upon an outstanding civilization and Athens was at
the zenith of her glory and power. The nations she had conquered
contributed to her wealth and her slaves furnished the labor for her
every great undertaking. It is no wonder that at this time she should
turn her heart toward her beloved Athena and honor her with a shrine.
Athena Parthenos was her name, hence the word Parthenon. She was the
wisest and most beautiful of the Grecian deities and the Parthenon was
her temple.
It is thought that the earliest Greeks worshiped their goddess with
crude altars of uncut stone and unhewn wood. Gradually, as the Greeks
became more intelligent, they began building temples, each lovelier than
the one before and all on the same foundation, as attested by
excavations at Athens. It is not known just how many temples there were
in this series, but it is known that the last one was destroyed by the
Persian Xerxes in the year 480 B.C. Then came the Parthenon, begun in
447 and dedicated to the goddess Athena in 438 B.C. Here for a thousand
years the Greeks worshiped their goddess, and it was during this period
that Greece produced the greatest of her philosophers, warriors,
artists, and writers.
The Parthenon was built under the supervision of Phidias, the greatest
artist of form the world has ever known. He was a close friend of
Pericles, archon of Athens, who, appreciating Phidias' great executive
ability as well as his genius, commissioned him to build the temple. He
had built a number of other temples for Pericles, notably the temple of
Zeus at Olympia, but the Parthenon was the most ambitious of all his
undertakings, as indeed it was the most ambitious of all the Greek
temples.
The Greeks were somewhat slow in embracing Christianity but by 426 A.D.
they had become a Christian nation. In the meantime Greece had fallen
under the dominion of the Roman Empire and the Emperor Theodosius II
changed the Parthenon into a Christian church. For a little more than a
thousand years the Greeks worshiped Jehovah in the Parthenon. After the
conquest by the Turks in 1458 the Parthenon was changed into a
Mohammedan mosque.
Except for the minor changes to the interior in the fifth century by the
Christians and those to the exterior in the fifteenth century by the
Turks, the Parthenon was almost in as good condition at the time of its
destruction in 1687 as it was in the beginning. In that year the Turks
were driven out of Athens by the Venetians, representing a Christian
nation. In this war the Turks temporarily stored gunpowder in the
Parthenon for safekeeping, thinking the Greek gods which adorned its
pediments would give them good luck. However, a Venetian shot, not so
respectful of the gods of the Greeks, struck the Parthenon and rendered
it the interesting ruin that, for the most part, remains today.
As a result of the explosion the entire interior was destroyed. The
columns, the architrave, the ceiling, the roof, nothing remained except
the floor and fragments of the walls. Fortunately the explosive agent
was gunpowder, whose power acts upward and outward only; consequently,
the floor was not materially injured and the markings on the floor
disclose the order of architecture, location, and diameter of the
columns.
The exterior did not suffer as much from the force of the explosion as
did the interior. Of the fifty-eight columns on the outside, forty-four
were left standing. Eight on the northeast corner and six on the south
side were entirely blown away. A few of the end columns were damaged
slightly. Almost all of the pedimental sculptures were blown off and
greatly injured. Only two fragmentary groups of the pedimental
sculptures are left on the old ruin.
In 1929 the Greek Government, with the assistance of American capital,
began a restoration of the Parthenon. It is to be hoped that the Greeks
will not allow anything to prevent the completion of this work.
[Illustration: The Parthenon at Nashville at Night]