At the time of its destruction in the seventeenth century, a little more than two thousand years after its completion, the Parthenon was almost in as good condition as it was at its beginning. The changes made by the Christians in the fifth century and by the Turks in the fifteenth century had impaired it but little, all of which is eloquent testimony to the thoroughness with which the task was accomplished. The co-ordination of mind, hand, and heart of the Greeks of that age has never been excelled by men of any time and found its culmination in the Parthenon. [Illustration: The Ruins of the Parthenon at Athens in 1929] The Parthenon at Athens The Parthenon was built on the Acropolis, a hill two hundred feet above the streets of Athens, in the year 438 B.C. Not yet had the blight of decay laid its hand upon an outstanding civilization and Athens was at the zenith of her glory and power. The nations she had conquered contributed to her wealth and her slaves furnished the labor for her every great undertaking. It is no wonder that at this time she should turn her heart toward her beloved Athena and honor her with a shrine. Athena Parthenos was her name, hence the word Parthenon. She was the wisest and most beautiful of the Grecian deities and the Parthenon was her temple. It is thought that the earliest Greeks worshiped their goddess with crude altars of uncut stone and unhewn wood. Gradually, as the Greeks became more intelligent, they began building temples, each lovelier than the one before and all on the same foundation, as attested by excavations at Athens. It is not known just how many temples there were in this series, but it is known that the last one was destroyed by the Persian Xerxes in the year 480 B.C. Then came the Parthenon, begun in 447 and dedicated to the goddess Athena in 438 B.C. Here for a thousand years the Greeks worshiped their goddess, and it was during this period that Greece produced the greatest of her philosophers, warriors, artists, and writers. The Parthenon was built under the supervision of Phidias, the greatest artist of form the world has ever known. He was a close friend of Pericles, archon of Athens, who, appreciating Phidias’ great executive ability as well as his genius, commissioned him to build the temple. He had built a number of other temples for Pericles, notably the temple of Zeus at Olympia, but the Parthenon was the most ambitious of all his undertakings, as indeed it was the most ambitious of all the Greek temples. The Greeks were somewhat slow in embracing Christianity but by 426 A.D. they had become a Christian nation. In the meantime Greece had fallen under the dominion of the Roman Empire and the Emperor Theodosius II changed the Parthenon into a Christian church. For a little more than a thousand years the Greeks worshiped Jehovah in the Parthenon. After the conquest by the Turks in 1458 the Parthenon was changed into a Mohammedan mosque.