Athens begins building the Parthenon

In 447 BCE the Athenians began a new temple for their goddess Athena on the Acropolis, the rock at the heart of their city. The Persians had burned the citadel in 480, together with an earlier temple begun on the same site about 490, and for three decades the ruins were left as they were; in 448 the city decided to rebuild its sanctuaries, and Pericles, its leading politician, drove the work. The architects Iktinos and Kallikrates designed a Doric temple with eight columns across each end and seventeen along each side, about 31 by 70 metres, on the site of the older temple, and the sculptor Phidias, Pericles's friend, oversaw the whole. Everything, down to the roof tiles, was cut from white marble quarried on Mount Pentelikon, some 16 kilometres away.

It rose fast. A board of overseers, changed every year, listed what it received and spent on a marble stele, and pieces of these accounts survive: quarrying and road-building in the first year, then timber, ivory and gold, then wages for the sculptors. By 438 the temple stood and Phidias's Athena Parthenos, 'Athena the Maiden', was set up inside: a figure of gold and ivory some twelve metres high, holding a Victory in her right hand. The statue alone cost more than 700 talents, the temple at least 500. The carving went on until 432: ninety-two metopes of mythical battles around the outside (gods against giants, Lapiths against centaurs, Athenians against Amazons, the fall of Troy), a continuous frieze round the walls inside the colonnade, most likely the procession of Athena's great festival, and in the two gables the birth of Athena and her contest with Poseidon for the land of Athens. The builders curved the floor and the beams very slightly, swelled the columns and thickened the corner ones so that the temple would look perfectly straight, and they painted the sculpture.

The money came above all from Athena's own treasury, which from 454/3 received a sixtieth of the tribute that Athens's allies in the Delian League paid each year for the war against Persia, once the league's treasury had been moved from Delos to Athens. Pericles's opponents, led by Thucydides son of Melesias, said the city was dressing herself up like a vain woman with money given for the war; Pericles answered that the allies paid for protection and got it, and in 444/3 the Assembly ostracized Thucydides instead of him. Some scholars doubt the Parthenon was ever a place of worship, for no altar of its own from the fifth century has been found, but it was certainly a treasure-house, and the city kept its reserves in the rear room that the Athenians called 'the parthenon', which gave the building its name. It was also a statement, to Greeks and to gods, of what the city and its empire could afford. The programme went on with the Propylaea gateway in 437; the temple was barely finished when the war with Sparta began in 431, and Pericles's enemies had already prosecuted Phidias over the gold of the statue.

The temple stood almost whole for some two thousand years. In late antiquity it became a church and Phidias's statue was taken away; in 1205, under Latin rule, it was dedicated to the Holy Mother of Athens as a cathedral; the Ottomans, who took the Acropolis in 1458, made it a mosque and raised a minaret. On 26 September 1687 a Venetian army under Francesco Morosini, besieging the Turkish garrison, landed a mortar bomb on the gunpowder stored inside: the explosion blew out the middle of the building, and the Venetians broke more sculptures trying to carry them off. From 1801 men working for Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman sultan, took down about half of what remained of the sculpture and shipped it to Britain, and in 1816 Parliament bought his collection for the British Museum for £35,000.

Since the founding of the Greek state in the 1830s the Parthenon has been the national symbol of Greece, and its forms have been copied in Neoclassical buildings all over the world. The young kingdom cleared the Acropolis of everything later than antiquity, the little mosque inside the temple included; the engineer Nikolaos Balanos's repairs around 1900 and again in the 1920s and 1930s gave the temple its familiar look but used iron that rusted and swelled inside the marble, and since 1975 a committee of specialists has directed a new restoration that returns each salvageable stone to its original place and fills the gaps with new marble from the ancient quarries. The Acropolis became a World Heritage Site in 1987. The sculptures remain divided: of the half that survives, about half is in Athens, shown since 2009 in the glass-walled gallery of the Acropolis Museum facing the rock, and half in the British Museum, which has refused Greece's requests for their return, formally made since 1983.