What does the name mean?
Parthenos is Greek for maiden or virgin, one of the titles of Athena. The temple was dedicated to Athena Parthenos, and the building took its name from her. It was never the only sanctuary of Athena on the Acropolis: the old cult statue of Athena Polias, Athena of the city, the one that received a new robe at her festival, was honoured in the Erechtheion nearby.
A house for a statue, and a treasury
Like every Greek temple, the Parthenon was built to house an image of the god, while worship and sacrifice took place outside at the altar. Its image was Pheidias’ statue of Athena Parthenos in gold and ivory. The building also held wealth: from 433 BCE the public funds of the city were kept in the opisthodomos, the smaller room at the west end.
Victory over Persia, told in myth
The Parthenon stands where an earlier temple was rising when the Persians took Athens in 480 BCE and burned the sanctuary. The Athenians rebuilt only a generation later, and the new temple, built in 447-438 BCE, carried the memory of that war in its sculpture. None of it shows Persians. The ninety-two metopes around the outside show four mythical battles: gods against giants on the east, Greeks against Amazons on the west, Lapiths against centaurs on the south, and the fall of Troy on the north. The Acropolis Museum reads them as allusions to the Greek victories over the Persians.
Athena and her city
The rest of the sculpture spoke about Athena and Athens together. The two pediments showed the birth of Athena on the east and, on the west, her contest with Poseidon for the land of Attica. The frieze showed the procession of the Greater Panathenaia, Athena’s great festival, in two streams that meet on the east side at the scene of the new peplos for the goddess. Read as one programme, the sculpture moves from the gods and myth on the outside to the citizens of Athens honouring their goddess on the frieze.
Power and money
The temple had a political meaning too, and the Athenians argued about it. The building was paid for in the years after the treasury of the Delian League, the alliance of Greek cities against Persia, had been moved from Delos to the Acropolis in 454/453 BCE. Plutarch reports that Perikles’ opponents accused Athens of gilding and adorning itself, like a wanton woman, with money the allies had paid for the war. Perikles’ answer, in his account, was that Athens owed the allies no account of the money as long as it fought the war for them and kept the Persians away.
Meanings added later
Later ages read the building in their own way. It became a church of the Holy Mother of Athens, then a mosque with a minaret, before the explosion of 1687 left it a ruin. Since 1987 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Acropolis.
Where to see it
The Parthenon stands on the Acropolis of Athens. Its surviving sculptures are divided between the Acropolis Museum, at the foot of the hill, and the British Museum in London, with some metopes still on the building. Opening hours change with the season, so check the official sites before you go.
Sources
- Acropolis Museum, Athens: “The metopes”; “The frieze”; “The pediments”.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Parthenon; Erechtheion.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: “Classical Art”.
- Plutarch, Life of Pericles 12, trans. B. Perrin (LacusCurtius, University of Chicago).
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), “Parthenon”; UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Acropolis, Athens”.
