Parthenon statue Type 1

The Parthenon, completed in 432 BCE on the Athenian Acropolis under the direction of Pheidias and the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, has stood as the supreme architectural achievement of Classical Greece for nearly two and a half millennia. The Doric temple of forty-six outer columns once enclosed the great chryselephantine Athena Parthenos; its frieze depicted the Panathenaic procession; its pediments showed the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus and her contest with Poseidon for patronage of Athens. The structure has been mosque, church, gunpowder magazine and ruin in turn, and remains the model from which every later neoclassical building descends.