After Athens' victory over Persia, Pericles directed the state's wealth into a wholesale rebuilding of the city. The Parthenon, the largest structure on the Acropolis, was completed in fifteen years under the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates with the master sculptor Phidias overseeing the figural programme. Built entirely of Pentelic marble, the temple stands on a 70 × 30 metre footprint with 46 Doric columns wrapping the perimeter.

The Parthenon's spell lies in its invisible refinements. The columns are not quite vertical, they incline slightly inward; the corner columns are thicker than the others; the floor rises a few centimetres at the centre. Every deviation exists to keep the human eye from registering true straight lines as sagging — corrections of perception, not of geometry. The building is the architectural form of the classical principle that nature is not copied but idealised.

The metopes outside and the frieze along the cella carried some of the most accomplished relief sculpture of the Greek world: Lapiths against Centaurs, the Panathenaic procession. Much of the frieze was removed by Lord Elgin in the early nineteenth century and is now in the British Museum, the focus of a long-running restitution dispute with Greece. The temple later became a Christian church, then an Ottoman mosque; in 1687 a Venetian bombardment exploded gunpowder stored inside and tore out the centre. What we see today is a deliberate restoration, not the temple's ancient continuity.