The Parthenon was not, as is popularly supposed, a temple for the worship of Minerva. The sanctuary for that particular purpose was in the Erechtheum, a triple temple, located upon the Acropolis not very far distant from the Parthenon, and having wings dedicated respectively to Minerva Polias, to Erechtheus or Neptune, wherein was a well of salt water, and to the Nymph Pandrosus, daughter of Cecrops. The Parthenon, however, served as a national treasury and repository for the valuable offerings to the goddess, as well as “a central point for the Panathenaic festival,” where prizes might be distributed to the victorious competitors. Indeed, the decorations of Phidias would tend to corroborate this inference, as the sculptured low relief of the frieze represented the Panathenaic procession. The rich relief carvings in the tympanums of the front and rear pediments of the building, also by Phidias, the designs of which may be found described in almost any work on Grecian art, have been reproduced in some of the vignettes of this book. In alluding to the Erechtheum, which, like the Parthenon and the Propylæa, still presents shapely and beautiful ruins to grace the Acropolis, attract the tourist and lend to the lover of art the best criterion of the ideal age of Grecian architecture, we must mourn the fact that the architect who designed this magnificent example of the Ionic order is not known, and it is not likely that he ever will be. The building was not finished at the time of the death of Pericles. Because of an inscription found in the Acropolis, and now in the British Museum, containing the particulars of a minute professional survey of the unfinished parts, made by an Athenian architect named Philocles, in the year 336 B.C., this architect has been given by some the credit of having been the author of the entire structure; but that he could not have been is clearly proven by the known fact that much of the temple was constructed, as we have stated, in the time of Pericles, or about one hundred years earlier. Nothing further, by the way, is known of Philocles than is here given.