Forbidden History - The Secrets of the Parthenon | Part 1

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

Long before it became a global controversy, the Parthenon was the ultimate statement of Athenian power. In Part I of our three-part special, historian Dominic Selwood takes us back to 5th-century BC Athens. Join us in exploring its construction under Pericles, its role as a temple and imperial treasury, and the powerful sculptural programme designed by Phidias. From the metopes and frieze to the towering statue of Athena to the changes that different cultures made to them. This is Part I of a three-part series. Part II, examining Lord Elgin and the removal of the sculptures, releases tomorrow. Part III follows the day after, exploring the legal and cultural debates that continues today. Cast List: Dominic Selwood: Journalist Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. We're an independent podcast, and advertisements help keep us going. Ads are automatically placed and not specifically chosen or endorsed by us, unless read by me the host. Thanks for supporting the show. For centuries, the Parthenon has stood as one of the most powerful symbols of the ancient world, a monument to ambition and empire. But behind its perfect proportions lies a far more complicated source. story, a story of one of the most bitter cultural disputes in modern history.

There are still some mysteries around what all of the bits of sculpture mean. In this three-parts special of Forbidden History, we're tracing the full journey of the Parthenon. We will explore its creation in the Golden Age of Athens through centuries of damage, transformation and survival, to the moment its sculptures left Greece and became known to the world, as the Elgin marbles. One really intriguing thing about the Parthenon is that although it looks like a temple and is usually called a temple, there's actually no evidence it was ever used as a temple. Helping guide us through this story is author and historian Dominic Selwood,

whose expertise takes us inside the ancient world that built the Parthenon, and the modern world that continues to argue over its legacy. It killed 300 people, blew out the roof, most of the sides, and much else as well. Across these three episodes, Dominic will unpack not just the actual events, but the legal and political implications of its journey through time. Hi, I'm Dominic Selwood and I'm a historian and barrister, and I love looking at some of the weirder sides of history. To understand why the Parthenon still matters today, we have to go back to the moment it was built.

Its modern significance and the controversies that surround it are rooted in the same political and cultural forces that defined its creation. The 5th century in Athens BC was an extraordinary time, because that was the golden age of Athens, when really everything we think about as ancient Greece was coming together. But you have to remember that Greece at the time wasn't a country. It was a whole range of small different city-states, and Athens was just one of them. But this was a period when Athens was really riding high. It had just beaten off the Persian Empire in a series of wars which had lasted decades, and it seemed Athens burned to the ground twice. But Athens had finally triumphed, so Athens was celebrating.

and one of the ways in which they celebrated was with a huge new building program. In 490 BC, Athens first faced Persian forces at the Battle of Marathon, where a largely Athenian army achieved a shocking victory against a much larger imperial force. A decade later, Persia returned under Xerxes I with an invasion army on a scale the Greek world had never seen. Athens was evacuated and burned twice, including the destruction of the Acropolis. But the war was decided at sea. In 480 BC, the Athenian Navy lured the Persian fleet into the narrow straits of the Battle of Salamis,

where smaller, more maneuverable Greek ships destroyed a far larger Persian force. This victory broke the momentum of the invasion, and the following year, combined Greek, Greek armies defeated the remaining Persian troops on land, ending the immediate threat. From the fires of war, Athens emerged transformed from a city-state into one of the strongest empires in the region. Athens began to see itself as the leading power of the Greek world, and they saw fit to project that power in the stonework of the city itself. At the center of this building program was a new temple to Athena, which was going to sit on top of the Acropolis, the great rock in the center of Athens. Athena was really important because Athens was her city.

It's where the name came from. And the Persians had ruined the statue and temple of Athena on the Acropolis. So the leader of Athens, who was a general called Pericles, decided that he was going to have it rebuilt. So he commissioned a man called Fideas. called Fidesas, who is probably one of the greatest sculptors that's ever lived, to design this grand new temple. And he picked two architects, men called Ictinos and Calicrates, to work on the details of the construction of the building. And what resulted was an absolutely extraordinary piece of art like the world had never seen. The scale was enormous. The detail was just incredible.

One of the real problems with ancient buildings like temples was something called Intassis, and that means that when you look at it, the straight lines of the columns appear slightly bent. So they got over this problem by doing two things. One, the entire building sblaze out towards its base. And secondly, every column bulges slightly in the middle. That means that no two blocks of stone in the entire building are identical. The maths is simply phenomenal. Along with this, the stone platform that the columns stand on is not flat, but rises gently

toward the center, where the columns themselves lean very slightly inward. Even the spacing between the columns varies by minute amounts, working together to create the impression of perfect straightness and balance. But aside from a shrine to the goddess Athena, what was the true purpose of this meticulously created structure? One really intriguing thing about the Parthenon is that although it looks like a temple and is usually called a temple, there's actually no evidence it was ever used as a temple. Normally what you would find is a sacrificial altar stone outside, but there isn't one. You'd also find records, and there are lots of records from the Parthenon, but those records for a temple would show that priests and priestesses were paid to celebrate the cult of a god or goddess there, and there are no such records.

So it's not even certain that it was ever used as a temple. If religious use wasn't the building's main role, then what was? And who had the resources to fund such an ambitious project? The funding of Pericles' building project and the Parthenon is a really murky story. After Athens was riding high from defeating the Persians, with a confederacy of other Greek states, the Greeks decided to bind together, together to form a defense pact that they called the Deleon League. And it was called that because they kept all their money on the island of Delos.

So every city-state paid into this fund, and that was a communal pool for common defense, if ever there was a problem. But as Athens became more and more dominant, it became almost an Athenian empire. And Pericles was so confident he could do what he wanted that he took the money from Delos and brought it to Athens, so he pilfered it. And he used it then for building the Parthenon and the other great buildings in his program. And actually, inside the Parthenon, there are two chambers.

The first chamber, the main one, is where the statue of the goddess Athena stood. But behind it is a strong room where he kept the money from the Deelian League. So we do know that one of the purposes of the Parthenon was to act as a storehouse. What this meant was that for For Greeks who weren't Athenians, if they visited Athens or sailed by and looked up and saw the Parthenon,

it wasn't necessarily a symbol of Greek majesty and might. It was a symbol of Athenian might, but also the Athenians having stolen the money of all the other city-states. So very mixed emotions for many non-Athenians seeing it. But what made the Parthenon really memorable for historians and for the culture of the world is that Fidesas developed an extraordinary scheme of sculpture for it. We'll dive deeper into the story right after a quick break. Now that we've explored why the Parthenon was built, we can turn to what the Athenians actually created.

Because it wasn't just a building, it was a statement of power and artistic ambition. So which parts of the Parthenon were seen not merely as structural necessities, but as masterpieces in their own right? Dominic Selwood tells us more. There had been plenty of sculpture on Greek temples before, but none had been conceived quite like this because there were multiple different types. So the main bit was when you looked at the building,

either from the front or behind, there was this large triangular space at the top of the roof that faced you. So in that space on the east was the story of Athena's birth because she sprang live from the forehead of her father's use. And on the western pediment was the story of how Athena came to be the goddess of Athens, how she beat Poseidon in a contest to have Athens as her city. The next major part are called the Metapes, and these are almost square panels

that run entirely around the building just under the roof and above the columns, and there are 92 of them, and they tell a range of different stories, depending on which side of the building it is. Each metapie depicts a mythical scene, usually involving two figures. On the north, they tell the story of the Trojan War, the Greeks defeating the city of Troy. On the east, it's the Gigantomachy, the battle between the Olympian gods and the giants. On the south, it's the centauramiki, a depiction of centaurs crashing the wedding of the king of the Lapiths.

And on the west, it's the Amazonomiki, the Athenians versus the Amazonians. And inside the building was the greatest statue of all, a 12-meter-high effigy of Athena, made of golden ivory, Chris Elephantine. That was the main attraction within the temple. The statue of Athena Parthenos is described in ancient sources as one of the greatest works of art ever made. Towering at almost 40 feet, the sculpture showed Athena, armed and victorious. She held a large shield and spear on her left, and in her right hand, a figure of Nike, the goddess of victory. The technique used to create this mighty statue, known as Chryssela-Fantyne, was not only visually

striking, but also displayed the vast store of wealth and cultural achievements of those who constructed them. Possibly the best known part though is the freeze which ran all the way round the building on the inside. It's supposed to show the Panathaniac procession, which happened every year but then there was a grand one every four years. And certain things were staples of that event. But when we look at its representation on the Parthenon, there are either bits that are missing or things that are there that shouldn't be there. So there's a distinction between cavalry and infantry and ships and what you'd expect to see and what actually is carved and represented there. Also, they've discovered that there was another freeze slightly lower down, but which is completely

destroyed. And that may in fact be the culmination or the end of this procession or whatever it is. But because it's missing, we don't really know what the panels are actually depicting. But for all their splendor, the fate of the Parthenon sculptures was far less majestic. The great statue from Athena inside the building disappeared and was never seen again. The gold was likely stripped, the other materials dismantled or destroyed, culminating in one of the greatest losses not just to the Parthenon, but to the history of art itself. The Parthenon survived as a temple dedicated to Athena for nearly 1,000 years. Like most Greek temples, it served as the city treasury for some time.

time, storing the wealth of the Delian League, which later became the Athenian Empire. But a bumpy road lay ahead for the future of this grand building and its sculptures. Athens, of course, didn't stay an ancient pagan city forever. Athens was absorbed into the Roman Empire, and as it began to be governed from Constantinople in the early 4th century AD, Theodosius II, decreed in fours. 35 that all pagan temples in the Eastern Roman Empire were to be closed. The result was that the Parthenon, which was a temple dedicated to the Virgin Athena, became dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It was Our Lady of Athens.

In this changing religious landscape, the Parthenon was repurposed and was converted to a Christian church sometime around 500 AD. It was to become one of a. one of the grandest Christian churches in the Eastern Mediterranean, but at a high cost. And at around that time, as was happening elsewhere, they destroyed lots of the imagery on the temple, partly because it was from the wrong religion, but also because of the Bible's injunction not to make images of things. So at that time, huge damage was done to the building, particularly the more obviously pagan parts of it, the metopes in particular from the north-eastern west, were very badly damaged.

That instance of iconoclasm in the AD 500s was the most serious act of damage to the sculptures in the whole history of the Parthenon. The Parthenon's life as the Church of the Parthanos Maria, or Virgin Mary, lasted almost a millennium, drawing pilgrims from across the Christian world. But even as its religious role endured, the empire ruling over it was about to.

was about to change. Athens went from being part of the Roman Empire, which of course the Roman Empire in the East became the Byzantine Empire. But when that fell, the Ottoman Empire took over. And the Ottoman Empire, based in Constantinople, modern Istanbul, was, of course, Muslim. And so when it was conquered by the Ottomans

in 1456 by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, steps were taken to make Athens a Muslim city. So the Parthenon was turned into a Muslim building and a mosque was built inside it. So parts of the building were destroyed to build a mosque inside it. The Ottomans were also constantly at war with lots of other people for control of the region. And one very notable example was their war against the Holy League. And in 1687, there was a particular battle when Venetian forces were outside Athens and shelling it with heavy ordnance.

As part of that battle, one mortar fired by the Venetians landed right on top of the Parthenon. The bombardment of Athens was part of a wider war between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire, as European powers attempted to push Ottoman control out of the eastern Mediterranean. People asked the question, why were the Venetians firing at the Parthenon?

And the answer is that the whole of the Acropolis rock, which sticks out and rises above Athens, is the most dominant point of the city. That's why it was the Acropolis, meaning the high place. Lots of Greek cities had them. But the Ottomans used it as a military garrison. It was the centre of the Ottoman occupation. Therefore, it was the most logical place to fire on. So yes, the Venetians were intentionally firing at the Acropolis.

At this point in history, the Parthenon was no longer being targeted for what it represented, but for what it had become. It had been stripped of its symbolism and reduced to a strategic position. And as if that didn't do enough damage in itself, the Ottomans were using the temple as a storage magazine for all of their gunpowder. And the result was absolutely catastrophic. It killed 300 people, blew out the roof, most of the sides, and much else said. as well. It again was a huge instance of massive damage to the building.

By the end of this period, the Parthenon's fate was no longer shaped by Athenians at all, but by empires passing through. Although the Venetians briefly captured the city, they were unable to hold it, and within a year the Ottomans returned and reasserted control. The battle achieved little strategically, but it left lasting damage, marking a decisive moment in its long decline. It is in this poor and partially destroyed condition that the next page of the Parthenon story turns. But this time, power does not arrive with fighting empires, but with credentials and paperwork. Listen to part two to hear the rest of the story. When a sculpture arrived in England, that wasn't the end of the story. Over the next 200 years,

they would become some of the most controversial pieces of art in history. Listen to Part 2 to hear the rest of the story. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you.

And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out Where Did Everyone Go, Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind Forgotten Places, available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.