Revisiting a Ruin.(Parthenon)(Brief Article)

In 1687 an invading Venetian Army bombarded the Parthenon with more than 700 cannonballs. The attack ignited stored ammunition and set off a massive explosion that shattered the Parthenon's columns, blew apart its internal rooms and left a toppling ruin. The white marble temple that stands today on the rocky Acropolis is a 20th-century construct that an Athenian of the fifth century B.C. would probably fail to recognize. In a lively new book that handles its rich scholarship with a light touch, Cambridge University classicist Mary Beard scrapes away centuries of myth and idealization, pulling the foundations of certainty out from under those crisp columns. She returns the temple to the context of its 2,500 years of turbulent history and questions the shaky assumptions on which our ideals of democracy and classical beauty rest.

Poets, writers and artists, from Keats to Le Corbusier, have woven the Parthenon and the democratic ideal it stands for into the fabric of cultures around the world. Like the work of Shakespeare, the structure seems to belong to a shared Western heritage. Pericles, who ordered the building of the Parthenon, told citizens, "You must... feed your eyes upon [Athens]... till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this." Pericles' celebration of Athenian values echoes down the centuries. During World War I, images of the Parthenon were printed on the sides of London buses to remind a weary populace of the "civilized" ideals their sons were dying for.

Yet the temple was controversial from the start, funded by tribute money the Greek Empire forced its subject states to pay in order to assert Athens's ...