The Parthenon is so famous that some admirers have been reluctant to visit it in case it failed to live up to their expectations. But they shouldn't worry, argues Mary Beard, because it seldom fails to evoke glowing superlatives from its visitors. Oscar Wilde, for example, at his first sight of the Acropolis, with its delicate naked columns rising up in the morning sunshine, enthused: "It was like coming upon some white Greek goddess."
Not all have been so enthusiastic, however. Rabindranath Tagore - Indian poet, composer of his country's national anthem, and inveterate traveller - is said to have cried at the utter "barbarian ugliness" of the Acropolis ruins. Byron also cried for the tragic ruin and horrible dismemberment of the monument.
The person mainly responsible for this dismemberment was Lord Elgin, British ambassador to Constantinople from 1799 to 1803. He had boatloads of Parthenon sculpture shipped to his home in London, which he then sold to the British Museum, thus giving rise to "the longest-running cultural controversy in the world".
Regardless of the rights or wrongs in the dispute (I'd have thought right is clearly on the side of Greece), Beard contends that it has helped to "keep the Parthenon at the very top of our cultural agenda". It's a curious but plausible argument: if the Parthenon hadn't been dismembered, it wouldn't have been half as famous.
A second-century AD description of the temple, from a Greek guide called Pausanias, survives. Pausanias had eyes mainly for the magnificent statue of Athena that once adorned the interior but is now lost without trace. Curiously, he had nothing to say about the architecture, especially the metope panels and sculpted frieze that ran round the entire building.
Plutarch wrote some decades earlier, and his Life of Pericles told of the construction of the Parthenon in fifth-century BC Athens. Pericles was a hero to Plutarch, who approved of his building programme, but dissenting voices were raised at the time, especially about the possible waste of resources (debates like the one about the Bertie Bowl are nothing new).
Study of the Parthenon illustrates the "fragility of our grip on the Greek and Roman world" because the lack of evidence makes it difficult to be sure of anything. We cannot be certain why the building was so named, what the sculpture on its famous and well- preserved frieze was trying to show or even what the building as a whole was for. In this fascinating book, written in such a lively, accessible style, Beard addresses these questions but also keeps an eye on the Parthenon's later history, right up to the present.
It was fortunate that classical temples were relatively easy and cheap for the early Christians to adapt because it guaranteed the ancient buildings' preservation. Some time in the sixth century, the Parthenon became a Christian church. Not many structural changes were necessary, but the sculptures on many of the metope panels were systematically defaced until their pagan subjects were unrecognisable. Christian paintings, sculptures and mosaics were added, as what was now Our Lady of Athens passed from Byzantine to Latin and eventually into Ottoman Turk hands, in which it became a mosque.
Then, in 1687, in a war between the Venetians and the Turks, the centre of the building - where the Turks, unfortunately, had stored their gunpowder - was blown out in a direct hit. From that time, the history of the Parthenon is the history of a ruin.
Once a ruin, it became increasingly ruinous and there was open season on its fabric and remaining sculpture. Locals used it for building stone and foreign visitors plundered it. This is the context for Elgin's dismemberment in the early 19th century. A long period of restoration followed the Greek War of Independence as the Acropolis came to symbolise the spirit of Greek nationhood. One unfortunate result of this was that the 19th-century archaeologists sought to restore the site's fifth-century pedigree, stripping it of as much of its later history as possible. Some of the Parthenon's reconstruction in the 1920s led to later problems and a painstaking programme of dismantling and rebuilding begun in 1986 is not likely to be completed much before 2010.
Beard concludes this little gem of a book with a look at the Elgin Marbles controversy. Having surveyed the debates from 1816 up to our own time, she believes "the case on both sides is powerful; otherwise, the dilemma would have been resolved long since". The Parthenon and its sculpture "have come to stand for deracination, dismemberment, desire and loss" and this is what now gives the monument "its cultural power and urgency". It's an interesting argument which seems dangerously close to justifying continued British retention of the marbles.
Brian Maye is a writer and historian
Brian Maye
The Parthenon. By Mary Beard. Profile Books, 198pp. £15 sterling