Acropolis Trivia
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60 free Acropolis trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Acropolis trivia quiz covers the sacred rock of Athens from its Mycenaean walls to the glass-floored museum at its foot. The easy questions ask what the word acropolis means, which statesman ordered the great fifth-century buildings, which temple crowns the rock, which goddess it honours, and where the Elgin Marbles ended up. Then it works through the monuments: the Propylaea gate, the tiny Ionic temple of Athena Nike, the Erechtheion with its porch of maidens, the lost bronze Athena Promachos and the gold-and-ivory Athena Parthenos. The hard end is for people who count column drums: the Bluebeard temple, the Persian debris pits, the unfluted drums built into the north wall as a war memorial, the Parthenon's eight-column facade and curved stylobate, the Panathenaic peplos, the Herulian raid, the Frankish tower, the mosque with a minaret, the 1687 Venetian bombardment, the caryatid taken to London, Byron's fury, the titanium dowels of the restoration project and the two men who tore down the swastika in 1941. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on the Acropolis of Athens, the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike, the Elgin Marbles, the Athena Parthenos, the caryatids, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus and the Acropolis Museum before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our ancient Greece, Athens and Greek mythology quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the Greek word 'acropolis' mean?
Highest city
Highest city. Greek towns grew up around a defensible hilltop, so many had an acropolis of their own; the one in Athens became so famous that it took over the word.
Q 02Cecrops, the legendary first king who gave the Acropolis its old name Cecropia, was shown as half man and half what?
Snake
Snake. Athenian artists gave Cecrops a man's body above the waist and a serpent's coiled tail below, fitting for a king said to have been born from the soil of Attica itself.
Q 03Which Athenian statesman launched the fifth-century BC building programme that gave the Acropolis the Parthenon?
Pericles
Pericles. He paid for the work with money the allies had contributed for war against Persia, and his critics, Plutarch says, likened the city to a vain woman decking herself in jewels.
Q 04In Greek myth, which gift did Athena plant on the Acropolis to win the city as its patron?
An olive tree
An olive tree. In the usual telling her rival struck the rock and raised only a salt spring, so the olive was judged the better gift and the city became hers.
Q 05The massive Bronze Age wall around the Acropolis was built in which masonry style?
Cyclopean
Cyclopean. Later Greeks could not believe that men had stacked boulders so huge, and credited walls like these to the Cyclopes, the giants of myth.
Q 06Why is an archaic temple from the Acropolis nicknamed the 'Bluebeard temple'?
Blue-bearded figures on its pediment
Blue-bearded figures on its pediment: a winged, three-bodied monster with a long coiled tail. Its broken pieces were dug up beside the Parthenon in the 1880s and fitted back together, traces of paint and all.
Q 07After the Persian sack of 480 BC, what did Athenians do with the Older Parthenon's column drums?
Built them into the north wall
Built them into the north wall, where the unfinished drums still show above the city: a reminder of the sack that the Athenians chose to keep in view.
Q 08Which sculptor oversaw the fifth-century BC rebuilding of the Acropolis and made its great statues of Athena?
Phidias
Phidias made the bronze Promachos and the gold-and-ivory Parthenos. Accused of stealing the statue's gold, he is said to have cleared himself because the plates could be taken off and weighed.
Q 09Which Persian king's army burned the temples on the Acropolis in 480 BC?
Xerxes I
Xerxes I's troops burned the Acropolis after most Athenians had been evacuated by sea, but the same year the Greek fleet smashed his navy at Salamis.
Q 10From which mountain was the marble for the Acropolis buildings quarried?
Mount Pentelicus
Mount Pentelicus marble holds traces of iron that oxidise over time, which is why the white temples of the Acropolis glow honey-gold at sunrise and sunset.
Q 11Tribute from which alliance of Greek city-states, led by Athens, helped pay for the Parthenon?
Delian League
The Delian League began as a free alliance against Persia, but when the island of Naxos tried to leave, Athens forced it back in; soon the allies were subjects, and their dues were paying for temples.
Q 12Which Bronze Age people built the first palace and fortress wall on the Acropolis, long before the Parthenon?
The Mycenaeans
The Mycenaeans. Almost nothing is left of their hilltop palace, but their wall, several metres thick, guarded the rock for centuries, and stretches of it can still be seen.
Q 13What is the name for the slight outward swelling built into the shafts of the Parthenon's columns?
Entasis
Q 21What happened to the Temple of Athena Nike in 1686?
The Ottomans dismantled it to build defences
The Ottomans dismantled it to build defences, packing its blocks into a wall; after Greek independence the pieces were dug out and the temple was put back together in the 1830s.
Q 22A famous relief from the parapet of the Athena Nike temple shows a winged goddess doing what?
Adjusting her sandal
Adjusting her sandal: she balances on one leg and reaches down, perhaps to slip it off, while her dress slides from her shoulder and clings as if wet.
Q 23Every four years the Great Panathenaea procession climbed the rock to present Athena with what?
Entasis. The temple's platform is curved as well, rising several centimetres toward the middle of each side, so its look of ruler-straight perfection is an illusion.
Q 14The gold-and-ivory Athena Parthenos inside the Parthenon is thought to have been built around a core of what?
Cypress wood
Cypress wood, probably: the frame was timber that resists rot, and the gold was fixed to it in plates that could be lifted off again.
Q 15Thucydides records that Athens counted the gold on Athena's statue as a reserve for its coming war with which rival?
Sparta
Sparta. As the invasion of 431 BC loomed, Athenians were told the statue's forty talents of gold could be taken off and spent, provided every bit was put back afterwards.
Q 16Sailors rounding Cape Sounion were said to glimpse which part of the bronze Athena Promachos on the Acropolis?
Her spear point
Her spear point, and her helmet crest too, wrote the traveller Pausanias, who called the nine-metre bronze a tithe of spoils taken from the Persians.
Q 17The six maidens standing on the Acropolis's famous porch today are what?
Modern replicas
Modern replicas. Five of the original maidens were moved indoors and now stand in the Acropolis Museum; the sixth was taken abroad in the early 1800s.
Q 18According to Vitruvius, columns carved as women recall which Peloponnesian town, punished for siding with Persia?
Caryae
Caryae. Vitruvius says its women were enslaved and then carved bearing loads as a lasting disgrace, but scholars doubt the tale, because such figures were in use well before the Persian Wars.
Q 19The temple with the caryatid porch housed a cult of which god, Athena's rival in the contest for Athens?
Poseidon
Poseidon. Visitors were shown a well of sea water and a trident mark in the rock there, said to be the proof he offered for his claim to the land.
Q 20The small Temple of Athena Nike beside the Acropolis gateway is built in which architectural order?
Ionic
Ionic. A carved frieze runs right round it: the gods gather over the door, and on the south side Greeks fight Persian horsemen, a battle from Athens's own history rather than from myth.
A new woven wool robe
A new woven wool robe, the peplos, made by women and girls chosen from the city; the Parthenon's frieze is thought to show the moment the folded cloth is handed over.
Q 24Herodes Atticus built the Odeon on the Acropolis's south slope in memory of whom?
His wife Regilla
His wife Regilla. She died pregnant after a beating by one of his freedmen; her brother charged Herodes with ordering it, he was acquitted in Rome, and the cedar-roofed hall followed.
Q 25Which invaders destroyed the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in AD 267 and prompted the building of the Beulé Gate?
The Heruli
The Heruli sailed down from the Sea of Azov and laid much of Athens waste before locals led by the historian Dexippus drove them off; the Acropolis was then walled in as a fortress again.
Q 26To whom was the Parthenon dedicated when it became a Christian church?
The Virgin Mary
The Virgin Mary. Athena had been worshipped there as Parthenos, 'the maiden', and Greek Christians used the same word for Mary, so the building kept a virgin patron.
Q 27Under Ottoman rule, what was the temple with the caryatid porch reportedly used as?
The governor's private harem
The governor's private harem, or so a traveller reported in 1678; recent research doubts the story, because no Turkish record mentions it.
Q 28Whose artillery fired the shell that blew up the gunpowder stored in the Parthenon in 1687?
The Venetians'
The Venetians', besieging an Ottoman garrison that kept its powder in the temple. Their commander Morosini then tried to carry off pediment statues as trophies and smashed them in the attempt.
Q 29The medieval Frankopyrgos on the Acropolis, demolished in 1875, was what?
A large tower
A large tower beside the gateway, used over the centuries as a lookout, a salt store and a prison. It came down when later additions were being stripped away to leave only the classical ruins.
Q 30Which US city, nicknamed the Athens of the South, has a full-scale replica of the Parthenon?
Nashville
Nashville put up its Parthenon for an 1897 exposition and later rebuilt it to last; inside stands a 13-metre recreation of the lost gold-and-ivory Athena.