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.
In the west end of the Naos, twenty feet from the end columns and facing the eastern doors, stood the Chryselephantine Statue of Athena, the beautiful shrine of the temple, if historians of that day are to be believed. The statue was forty feet high and reached within three feet of the ceiling. It was made, as its name indicates, of gold and ivory. The fleshy parts were carved ivory and the remainder were plates of gold suspended on a framework of cedarwood. It was the masterpiece of Phidias and was worth a king’s ransom.
When Theodosius II changed the Parthenon into a Christian church in the fifth century he moved the statue of Athena to Byzantium, capital of the Roman Empire, as it would have been incongruous to leave it in the Parthenon after the change in religions. After the removal of the Chryselephantine Statue its fate is shrouded in mystery. No part of it and no authentic sketch, drawing, or model of it has ever been found.
Interior of Naos or East Room of Parthenon at Nashville Showing the Ceiling and Plaster Casts of Elgin Marbles
The Greeks entered the eastern doors at the hour of temple worship, always in the early morning, bearing gifts of gold and silver and other valuable articles. There they were met by the priests, who received the gifts. While the worshipers paid their devotions to the goddess at her shrine, the priests took the gifts through the great doors, thence along the exterior corridors, through the western doors, and into the west room where the gifts were deposited. This room is called the Maiden’s Chamber or Treasury.