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This is the Parthenon as it stands in Athens today. This once magnificent structure was built from 447 to 432 BCE during the Classical period in ancient Athens. Just 50 years before construction began, Greece had been at war with Persia. The war resulted in the the sack of Athens by the powerful(especially compared to the relatively small Greek state) Persians once in 480 and again in 479 BCE. Temples, homes, and sculpture were reduced to rubble. The Greek empire finally succumbed to the forces of the Persian Empire and agreed to pay the enormous tribute that the Persians demanded. The Persians did not try to convert the people they conquered and then occupy the new territory, as many empires over the centuries futilely attempted. Instead the Persian forces would ravage the conquered city, loot all its valuables and then leave, promising not to return if a tribute (gold, or other traded goods) was paid at set times each year. Within the Persian tribute system, Greece was one of the highest paying states. Enrichment by Meiterranean trade was a key economic impetus for the Persian invasion of the Greek civilization. As the dust settled after the war, sculpture and large scale architecture were almost forgotten, but in 447 the democratic leader of Athens, Pericles, saw the time was ripe for sculpture to be reborn. The movement of the Greek treasury to the city of Athens provided the resources that made this rebirth possible. Unfortunately, the use of Greek money, as opposed to just Athenian, created an unequal distribution of wealth that later developed tensions between the poorer Northern and wealthier Southern cities. Pericles' vision, which resulted in the Parthenon and the rebuilding of the Acropolis (the Parthenon only being part of a grouping of buildings), pushed the Greek art to its fullest potential. The specific design of the Parthenon was aimed to match the prosperity of Athens and to that extend an enlarged scale of typical doric temple was used for the Parthenon. The photograph above shows the modern reconstruction of the remaining pieces of the main structure; much of the original building has been lost or relocated into museums. A famous example is the Elgin Marbles, which include many pieces of sculpture that were taken to England during the beginning of the nineteenth century by Lord Elgin and now reside (to Greece's protest) in the British Museum. The computer generated 3-D depiction of the Parthenon is based on the measurements obtained by recent studies, representing what the Parthenon may have once looked like.
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