How the Parthenon was built with such limited technology: nine years, 100,000 tons of marble, no mortar, and curves you cannot see

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens was built between 447 and 438 BC, with its sculpture finished by 432, as the temple of Athena Parthenos, the city's goddess, on the initiative of Pericles and with the money of the Delian League, to the design of the architects Ictinus and Callicrates under the supervision of the sculptor Phidias. It is a Doric temple of Pentelic marble, 228 by 101 feet (69.5 by 30.9 m), with 46 outer columns 34 feet (10.4 m) high, and it was built in nine years by a workforce of a few hundred using iron tools, wooden cranes, oxen, rope and the human eye, with every one of its 13,400 blocks cut to fit its neighbours without mortar and every horizontal line curved and every vertical line leaning by amounts too small to see and too consistent to be accidental. Below: who built it and why, where the marble came from and how it moved, how the blocks were lifted and fitted, the refinements, the sculpture, the workers and what they were paid, what happened to the building, and the numbers, with the style in Ancient Greek architecture.

Who built it and why

The Persians had burned the Acropolis and its unfinished temple in 480 BC, and for thirty years the Athenians left the ruins as a memorial, until Pericles, the leading politician of the democracy, persuaded the assembly in 449 to rebuild, using the treasury of the Delian League, the alliance of Greek cities against Persia whose contributions Athens had moved from Delos to the Acropolis in 454 and now treated as its own; his opponents said the city was "gilding and beautifying herself like a vain woman" with the allies' money, and he answered that as long as Athens defended them the money was hers to spend, and that the building gave work to every trade in the city. The Parthenon was the first and largest of the programme, followed by the Propylaea gateway, the Erechtheion and the temple of Athena Nike. The architects named by Plutarch are Ictinus, who wrote a book on the building, and Callicrates, with the sculptor Phidias, Pericles's friend, in overall charge and responsible for the 40-foot gold-and-ivory statue of Athena inside, which held a ton of gold that could be removed and weighed, and was, when Phidias was accused of stealing some. Parthenon.

The marble and the road

The marble came from Mount Pentelicon, 10 miles north-east of Athens, whose white, faintly gold, fine-grained stone had never been used for a whole temple; the quarries are still there on the mountain's south-west face, at 2,300 to 3,300 feet, with the ancient quarry road, cut into the slope with grooves for the sledges' brakes and holes for the posts they were roped to, running down to the plain. Quarrymen split the blocks from the bed by cutting a channel around them with iron picks and driving in iron or dry wooden wedges, which were wetted and swelled, along the line of the grain; the blocks were roughed out on the spot to reduce weight, marked with the position they would take, and lowered on wooden sledges down the road, braked by ropes wound around posts, then loaded on carts with wheels 12 feet across drawn by teams of up to 30 oxen for the journey of a day or two to the Acropolis, and up a ramp to the rock. About 100,000 tons were quarried for 22,000 tons of finished stone, and the accounts show that transport cost more than the quarrying: a single column drum could cost as much to move as to cut.

Lifting and fitting

• Foundations. The Parthenon stands on the platform the Athenians had built for the earlier temple, extended on the south with up to 22 courses of limestone blocks; the three steps of the crepidoma are marble.
• Cranes. The blocks, up to 10 tons and the corner architraves 12, were lifted by wooden cranes with compound pulleys and winches, the Greek invention of the 6th century BC, gripping the block by a rope around it, by lifting bosses left on the sides, by U-shaped grooves cut for the rope, or by a lewis, an iron wedge in a dovetailed slot in the top; the bosses and grooves can still be seen on unfinished blocks.
• Columns. Each column is 11 drums of about 5 to 10 tons, turned on a lathe-like bed for the roughing, stacked with a square cedar plug (empolion) in the centre of each joint to align the drum above, and the joint surfaces ground together by rotating the upper drum on the lower until they met along the whole face, with the contact ring polished; the fluting, twenty flutes, was cut after the column stood, from the top down, with the top and bottom cut first as guides.
• Joints. No mortar anywhere: wall blocks were cut with a slightly hollow centre and a polished band round the edge (anathyrosis) so that only the band touched and the fit was perfect where it showed; blocks in a course were tied with iron clamps in the shape of a double T set in lead, and to the course below by iron dowels in lead, the lead poured in to keep water from the iron, which is why the building stood through earthquakes and why the 20th-century restorers' steel clamps, unprotected, rusted and split the marble.
• Roof. Cedar beams from Macedonia and Thrace carried a roof of Parian marble tiles, translucent, each about 2 by 3 feet, laid like a modern tiled roof; the ceiling of the colonnades was marble coffers.
• Finishing. The outer surface of each block was left with a protective skin a few millimetres thick until the building was up, and then dressed back to the final face from the top down, so that the finished stone had never been touched by a crane or a rope; the columns were finished last.

The curves you cannot see

The Parthenon has almost no straight lines. The stylobate, the top step on which the columns stand, rises in a curve toward the middle of each side, by 2.4 inches (6 cm) on the short sides and 4.3 inches (11 cm) on the long, and the entablature above follows it; the columns lean inward by about 2.5 inches at the top, so that their axes would meet a mile and a half up, and the corner columns lean diagonally; the columns are 2 inches thicker at the corners, where they are seen against the sky, and swell in the middle (entasis) by about 0.7 of an inch; the corner columns are closer to their neighbours than the rest; the walls of the cella lean inward, the antae outward. Every one of these refinements was measured in the 1840s by Francis Penrose and the reasons have been argued since: Vitruvius says they correct optical illusions, a straight stylobate appearing to sag and vertical columns to splay, and the measurements suggest they also give the building a tension, a look of muscle, that a straight-lined copy lacks. They were set out by measurement from a curved template for the steps, and required every block of the stylobate and every column drum to be cut to its own slightly different shape, and the builders did this by hand in nine years. The same refinements exist in earlier temples, at Corinth and Paestum; the Parthenon has them all at once and most exactly.

The sculpture

Phidias's workshop, whose building has been found at Olympia but not at Athens, carved 92 metopes over the outer colonnade, the battles of gods and giants, Greeks and Amazons, Lapiths and centaurs, and Greeks and Trojans, done first and in varying quality; the frieze of 524 feet around the top of the cella wall, in low relief, showing the Panathenaic procession of horsemen, chariots, elders, musicians and sacrificial animals converging on the gods, which was seen from below through the columns and was carved in place; and the two pediments, the birth of Athena on the east and her contest with Poseidon on the west, in figures over life-size carved in the round, finished at the back where no one would see. All of it was painted in blue, red and gold, with bronze attachments for weapons and harness, and the building itself was painted in parts. The statue of Athena, of gold plates over a wooden core with ivory for the flesh, stood in the cella in a shallow pool of water that kept the ivory from cracking, holding a 6-foot Victory in her hand; it survived until at least the 5th century AD and vanished in Constantinople. The east pediment and half the frieze are in London, taken by Lord Elgin's agents in 1801–05 with a permit from the Ottoman governor whose text and meaning are disputed; the rest is in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, which opened in 2009 with an empty gallery for the return.

The workers and their pay

The building accounts of the Parthenon were carved on marble slabs on the Acropolis and survive in fragments, giving the yearly spending of the treasurers; those of the Erechtheion, thirty years later, list the workers by name: citizens, resident foreigners and slaves side by side, at the same rate, a drachma a day for a skilled man, a mason, a carver or a carpenter, the same as a hoplite soldier, and the slaves' wages paid to their owners. The workforce of the Parthenon at its peak was a few hundred: quarrymen at Pentelicon, carters, masons, marble carvers who fluted the columns and cut the mouldings, sculptors under Phidias, carpenters for the cranes, the scaffolding and the roof, ropemakers, painters, gilders and the smiths who made the clamps and the tools, iron chisels, points, drills, saws with sand and water, and the bow drill for the deep cuts of the sculpture. Plutarch says Pericles's aim was that "the whole city should be in receipt of pay". The cost was about 470 talents of silver, about 12 million drachmas, with the statue another 700 to 1,000 talents in gold and ivory; Athens's annual income from the League was 400 to 600 talents, and the temple took about one year's worth, plus the statue.

What happened to it

• Temple to church, 6th century AD. Converted to a church of the Virgin, with an apse in the east end and the pediment sculpture there destroyed; then a cathedral, then under the Franks a Latin one, with a bell tower.
• Mosque, 1458. After the Ottoman conquest, a mosque with a minaret in the bell tower.
• 26 September 1687. A Venetian army besieging Athens fired a mortar shell into the building, which the Turks were using as a powder magazine; the explosion blew out the middle of both long sides, brought down the roof and the cella walls and killed 300, and made the ruin that exists. Morosini, the Venetian commander, then tried to take the west pediment figures and dropped them.
• 1801–05. Elgin's agents removed about half the surviving sculpture, sold to the British Museum in 1816.
• 1833. The Greek state took the Acropolis and cleared the Ottoman village and mosque from it; Nikolaos Balanos restored the north colonnade in 1898–1933 with steel clamps and cement, which failed.
• 1975 to now. The Acropolis Restoration Service has taken down and rebuilt Balanos's work, block by block, with titanium clamps and new Pentelic marble where needed, restoring more of the building than has stood since 1687; the work is expected to continue for years.

The numbers

• Size. 228 by 101 feet (69.5 by 30.9 m) on the stylobate; 8 columns on the fronts, 17 on the sides, 46 in all, 34 feet (10.4 m) high and 6.2 feet (1.9 m) thick at the base; the cella 98 feet long, roofed at about 40 feet.
• Stone. About 13,400 blocks; 22,000 tons of finished marble from 100,000 quarried; 92 metopes, 160 m of frieze, about 50 pediment figures.
• Time. 447–438 BC for the building, 9 years; the sculpture to 432, 15 years in all.
• Cost. About 470 talents for the building; the statue 700–1,000 talents; a talent was 6,000 drachmas and a drachma a day's wage.
• Refinements. Stylobate curve 6 cm on the ends and 11 cm on the sides; column lean 6 cm; entasis 1.7 cm; corner columns 5 cm thicker.
• Visitors. About 3 million a year on the Acropolis, capped at 20,000 a day since 2023, by timed ticket; the interior is closed, and the Acropolis Museum below holds the sculpture with the London casts beside the gaps.

Versions and theories

• The Golden Ratio. The Parthenon's facade is often said to be a golden rectangle; it is not, the ratio of width to height depending on where you measure, and the Greek architects worked in whole-number ratios, 9:4 for the stylobate and for the column spacing to diameter. The golden ratio was applied to the building in the 19th century.
• The curves are settlement. Penrose and every survey since find them too regular, too symmetrical and present in the steps as cut, with matching curves in the entablature; the foundations have not settled.
• It was built with the allies' money. Yes; Pericles said so, and the tribute lists were carved on the Acropolis beside it.
• It was a treasury, not a temple. The back room, the "Parthenon" proper, held the League's treasury and the goddess's; the front room held her statue and cult. Some scholars argue it had no altar and was never a temple in the full sense; it was both.
• Elgin saved the marbles. The argument runs that Athens under the Turks would have destroyed them, and the 1687 explosion and the lime kilns support it; the counter-argument is that his permit allowed drawing and casting, not sawing, and that the removal damaged what stayed. The dispute is where it was.
• The Parthenon was white. It was painted, at least in the sculpture and the mouldings, with traces of blue, red and green found; the plain white marble is a taste of the Renaissance.

The temple's Roman heir is in Roman architecture, and the men who copied it two thousand years later in Neoclassical architecture.

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