Built on the Athenian Acropolis between 447 and 432 BCE, the Parthenon was a Doric temple to Athena famous for its optical refinements — curved floor, columns that lean and swell — so the whole reads as perfectly straight. It once held a twelve-metre gold-and-ivory statue of the goddess. The most copied building in Western tradition, it was substantially funded by tribute from Athens's subject allies. A Venetian shell exploded the gunpowder stored inside in 1687. Lord Elgin removed about half the surviving sculpture in the early 1800s; those pieces remain in the British Museum.
It is the most copied building on earth. Look at a parliament, a national bank, a courthouse, or an art museum almost anywhere in the West, and you are likely looking at a descendant of one temple on a rock above Athens. The Parthenon has stood for nearly 2,500 years as the image of Greece, of reason, and of beauty itself. Yet the marble emblem of democracy was paid for largely with the tribute of an empire, and about half of its sculptures sit not in Athens but in a London museum, the prize in an argument that has run for two centuries and is still unsettled.