The Parthenon at Athens, Greece and at Nashville, TennesseeWilson, Benjamin Franklin
History
The Parthenon at Athens, Greece and at Nashville, Tennessee
Wilson, Benjamin Franklin
Parthenon (Art museum : Nashville, Tenn.); Parthenon (Athens, Greece)
The main body of the building is called the cella. The exterior walls of
the cella on the long sides with the columns form majestic corridors.
The shadows falling at certain times of the day on the walls and floors
of the corridors are very beautiful.
Another interesting feature connected with the corridors is what has
come to be known as the “Greek Urn.” This is the figure cut in the sky
by the columns and architrave at the ends of the long exterior
corridors. The Greek Urn has been made famous in literature by the poet
Keats in his “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”
The only openings to the Parthenon are the two pairs of great bronze
doors leading off the east and west porticos. These doors are the
largest in America and probably are the largest bronze doors in the
world. They can only be challenged as to size by the Congressional
Library doors at Washington or by those of one of the old cathedrals in
Florence, Italy, and they are slightly larger than either. The doors are
twenty-four feet high, seven feet each wide, a foot thick, and weight
seven and one-half tons each.
There is no doubt that the front entrance to the Parthenon was through
the eastern doors. If there were no documentary evidence to prove this,
and there is an abundance, the fact that all of the twenty-two gods of
the east pediment are major deities of the Greeks while only four of
those on the west pediment are major (the remainder being
personifications and minor deities) would be sufficient proof that the
eastern end was the front of the building.
Entering the Parthenon through the eastern doors, the visitor most
likely would first note the division of the main body of the building,
or cella, by a transverse wall into two rooms—the east room and the west
room.
The east room is known as the Naos or temple proper. It is ninety-eight
feet long, sixty-three feet wide, and has a ceiling height of
forty-three feet. The most striking feature of the Naos is the double
row of Doric columns, twenty-three below and twenty-three above, with an
architrave between. These form a colonnade surrounding the main floor on
three sides. The lower units of the colonnade are three and
three-quarter feet in diameter at the base and twenty-one feet high.
Those of the upper tier are two and one-quarter feet in diameter and
sixteen feet high. The columns on the long side of the colonnade form
with the interior cella walls beautiful and impressive corridors.
Another interesting feature is that the floor of the corridors is raised
an inch and a half above the main floor of the Naos.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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