The west room is forty-four feet long and sixty-three feet wide. As in the east room, its most striking feature is the columns. There are four of these arranged in a rectangle sixteen by twenty-three feet in the center of the room. The columns are Ionic in design and, unlike those of the east room, are monoliths. They are forty-one feet high, six feet in diameter at the base, and three and one-half feet in diameter at the top. The decorations of the room are Ionic also, in contrast with those of the east room.
The decorations of the Parthenon are all authenticated. Fragments of them are preserved in the British Museum and in the Louvre, and some of the colors still show, though dimly, on the protected parts of the ruin at Athens. The decorations at the top of both the interior and exterior architrave, above and between the capitals of the Doric columns are technically known as guttae. The color decorations are principally in shades of blue and red with some yellows. In the interior the colors are found in the fret along the top of the architrave in the east room and in the moldings around the ceilings of both rooms. The colors of the exterior occur in the frets around the top of the cella walls, in the ceiling of the corridors and porticos, and in the decorations of the cornice.
The Greeks lighted the old temple almost wholly through the great doors in each end of the building; at Nashville the lighting comes from above, and this is one of the most prominent of the modern innovations incorporated in the reproduction of the Parthenon. The Greek ceiling was exactly like that at Nashville with this exception: In the Greek temple, between the great cedar beams that span the ceiling and support the roof was an open grillwork of cedarwood, while at Nashville the open spaces have been filled with frosted panes of glass, etched to resemble the rays of the sun. The Greeks might have had glass, as the manufacture of plate glass by the Phoenicians antedated the period of Pericles by some five hundred years. As we have seen, however, they had no incentive to use it, for they obtained their light from below. The incentive at Nashville is to conceal the two hundred and seventy-two high-powered electric lights which give to the interior its beautiful simulation of sunlight, accentuating its beauty and, to a great extent, eliminating the shadows.
The roof at Nashville is like the one at Athens except as to the material used in its construction. The antefixes along the eaves served the purpose of covering the joints between the marble slabs and are of carved ornamental design. At each corner of the roof is a lion’s head, thought to be intended originally as a waterspout. Also at each corner of the roof is a stone block upon which is surmounted a Gryphon monster, standing guard over the temple day and night. The highest points on the Parthenon are the carved ornaments, known as the Acroteria, at each end of the building above the pediments.
It is difficult for anyone to describe the Parthenon and do it justice. Suffice it to say that “it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.”
The Naos or East Room Showing Symmetry of Columns, the Depressed Floor and Some of the Elgin Marbles
The Architecture of the Parthenon
The architecture of Greece was essentially Doric. The Ionic was an exotic in Athens and the Corinthian was more Roman than Grecian and found no place in the Parthenon. There is a total of one hundred and eight columns in the building, and of these all on the exterior and all in the east room, one hundred and four in number, are Doric, while the four in the west room are Ionic.
Taste varies in the beauty of architecture as well as in art generally. Some admire the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, others admire the Taj Mahal in India, and still others prefer the temples of Japan; but to those who admire the architecture of the Greeks and the Romans, the Parthenon is the most beautiful building in the world. Regardless, however, of what may be thought of the beauty of its architecture, it is the most perfect.