Where do you measure a temple?
A modern box has one length. A Greek temple has several, because it stands on steps, its columns stand on the top step, and its roof projects beyond the columns. The figure that specialists quote is taken on the stylobate, from the Greek for “column base”: the upper surface of the top step. On that level the Parthenon measures 30.88 by 69.50 metres.
Other published figures differ by a few centimetres: 30.89 by 69.54 metres measured on the top step, or 69.512 metres for the north side in one detailed survey. They are measurements of a hand-built marble platform taken at slightly different points, and they all describe the same building, a little under seventy metres long and less than half as wide.
Columns and plan
The outer colonnade has 8 columns on the short ends and 17 on the long sides. The corner columns belong to both rows, so the total is 46. Seventeen is twice eight plus one.
Inside the colonnade the plan follows the usual Greek temple plan, with refinements. Each end had an inner porch of six columns, the pronaos at the east and the opisthonaos at the west. The cella, the main room, was divided by a cross wall into two unequal spaces. The larger, to the east, was a hundred feet long; in front of a two-storey colonnade in the shape of a Π stood the gold and ivory Athena Parthenos, twenty-six cubits tall, about 11.5 metres. The smaller room to the west, the opisthodomos, had four Ionic columns holding up its ceiling.
Bigger than the temple it replaced
The Parthenon was built on the platform of an earlier, unfinished temple, the pre-Parthenon, begun after 490 BCE and burned by the Persians in 480. That temple measured 23.53 by 66.94 metres on its stylobate. The new design was only a little longer, but more than seven metres wider.
The 4:9 relationship
Divide the width by the length and you get 0.444, which is four-ninths almost to the third decimal. A ratio of small whole numbers is simple to set out on the ground. Whether Iktinos and Kallikrates planned it that way, no ancient text says, and the same caution applies to the most famous claim made about the building, that it was designed on the golden ratio.
The sculpture, in numbers
The building carried sculpture on a matching scale. Ninety-two metopes ran above the outer columns; one of the east ones measures 1.34 metres high and 1.27 wide. The frieze around the top of the cella walls was 160 metres long and 1.06 metres high, carved on 115 blocks with 378 figures and more than 220 animals. The two pediments held fifty statues.
Straight lines that are not straight
Measure the stylobate along its length and you find it is not level. Stevens recorded seventeen points along the north side and found that the platform rises gradually to a maximum of 10.3 centimetres at the centre, then falls again. The curve is deliberate. It is one of the optical refinements of the building, which also include the swelling of the columns and the narrower spacing at the corners, and it means that no single figure tells the whole story of the Parthenon’s shape.
Where to see it
The Parthenon stands on the Acropolis of Athens, inside the archaeological site; the north side, with its seventeen columns, is the best place to see the length of the building. The east metopes and the frieze blocks kept in Athens are in the Acropolis Museum, at the foot of the hill. Opening hours change with the season, so check the official sites before you go.
Sources
- M. Voutyras and A. Goulaki-Voutyra, Ancient Greek Art and Its Legacy, Centre for the Greek Language (2012), “The Parthenon”.
- J. R. Senseney, The Art of Building in the Classical World (Cambridge University Press), appendix C, on G. P. Stevens’ survey of the north stylobate.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Parthenon”.
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), “Parthenon”; Acropolis Museum, “The metopes”, “The frieze”, East metope 1 (Akr. 20000).
- Plutarch, Life of Pericles 13.4 (LacusCurtius), for the hundred-foot cella; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.18 (Perseus Digital Library), for the height of the statue.
