About two thousand years had passed without that great leveller Time or the corroding influences of the elements marring to any very serious extent the beauty and completeness of the Parthenon, during which period it had suffered two changes most antagonistic to its original purpose, having been transformed at one time into a Christian church and at another into a Turkish mosque. In respect to the first transformation, it is well to note that the significance of its name was not wholly lost in the change. Parthenon means Virgin, and the Christians called the church into which they turned it the Church of the Blessed Virgin. It was seen entire by Spon and Wheeler in 1676. But when the Venetians, in their war with the Turks, eleven years later, besieged the citadel, they threw a bomb upon the roof of the noble structure, which, passing through it, ignited the powder which had been stored in the building by the Turks. The result was an explosion which divided and reduced the temple to its present condition, save for further depredations which seem hardly creditable. The iconoclastic Turks found this pride of Pericles most useful as a quarry upon which to draw for much of the material used in their own buildings, and it is to be regretted also that Lord Elgin should have found it necessary to enrich a distant museum in London with many of its most beautiful carvings, adding further desecration to “what Goth and Turk and Time had spared.” Vitruvius informs us that Ictinus, in collaboration with another architect, not otherwise mentioned, wrote a book upon the Parthenon, his greatest masterpiece. After searching the world over for her dear, lost daughter, the beautiful Proserpine, who had been spirited away to the realm of Pluto, Ceres finally gave up the quest and mournfully settled down at Eleusis, a city in fertile Bœotia, about fourteen miles from Athens. Here was erected in her honor and in memory of Proserpine an Ionic temple by the people for whom she became sponsor. The Persians, during their invasion of Attica, burned the temple, but Pericles caused it to be rebuilt, and selected Ictinus as the architect. He erected a handsomer structure in the Doric style, which, it is said, was without exposed columns.