Parthenon Trivia
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49 free Parthenon trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Parthenon has been a temple, a treasury, a church, a mosque and a gunpowder store, and it is still standing after a direct hit from a Venetian mortar. This quiz covers all of it. It opens with the building: begun in 447 BC under Pericles, designed by Ictinus and Callicrates, supervised by Phidias, made of Pentelic marble, with eight columns across the front instead of six and steps that bulge upward so subtly you would never notice. Then it moves to what was inside and on it: the forty talents of gold on the Athena Parthenos, the Delian League money in the back room, the 92 metopes and their four battles, the 160-metre Ionic frieze, and the pediments showing Athena's birth and her quarrel with Poseidon. The second half is the afterlife: the Persian sack of the older Parthenon, the Christian iconoclasts, the mosque, Morosini's bomb of 1687, Lord Elgin's agents, the 1816 vote in Parliament, Byron's fury, the Acropolis Museum of 2009 and the pieces trickling home from the Vatican and Sicily. It ends in Nashville, where a full-scale concrete replica holds a gilded Athena. Easy questions suit anyone who has seen a photo of the Acropolis; the expert tier is for classicists and architecture students. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Parthenon, its sculptures, its plunderers and its copies, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What were the Ottomans storing in the Parthenon when a besieging army's shell wrecked it in 1687?
Gunpowder
Gunpowder turned one mortar hit into an explosion that blew out the building's centre; until then it had stood essentially intact for more than two thousand years.
Q 02The Parthenon was finished on the eve of which war?
Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 BC, with the temple's last sculptures barely finished, and after 27 years of it Athens surrendered to Sparta.
Q 03Which Athenian statesman initiated the building programme that produced the Parthenon?
Pericles
Pericles faced complaints about the cost; Plutarch says he offered to pay himself and put his own name on the buildings, and the assembly told him to spend freely.
Q 04The Parthenon's architects were Callicrates and which other man?
Ictinus
Ictinus wrote a book about the temple with a man named Carpion; the Roman architect Vitruvius lists it, but no copy survives.
Q 05Which sculptor supervised the Parthenon's construction and its sculptural decoration?
Phidias
Phidias also made the huge statue of Athena inside; Plutarch says rivals of his patron later had him prosecuted, claiming he had stolen precious material meant for it.
Q 06The Parthenon's white marble was quarried near Athens on which mountain?
Mount Pentelicus
Mount Pentelicus marble takes on a honey-gold glow in sunlight, and today's restorers fill gaps in the temple with new blocks cut from the same mountain.
Q 07The Parthenon's west pediment showed the contest in which Athena won Athens by giving the city what?
An olive tree
An olive tree won her the city in the myth; Herodotus says a sacred olive on the Acropolis, burned by invaders, had put out a fresh shoot by the next day.
Q 08What does the Parthenon's seemingly flat platform actually do toward the middle of each side?
Rises
Rises: the base climbs slightly toward the centre, one of several refinements that some experts believe were meant to correct tricks of the eye.
Q 09The slight swelling of a column that tapers toward the top is known by what term?
Entasis
Entasis comes from a Greek verb meaning to stretch tight, and may have been meant to make columns look stronger; the Parthenon's is so slight it is almost invisible.
Q 10The Parthenon's east pediment showed Athena being born from the head of which god?
Zeus
Zeus's head was split open with an axe in the myth and Athena sprang out fully armed; the scene's central figures were removed when the temple became a church, to make room for an apse.
Q 11The word Parthenon comes from the Greek parthenos, meaning what?
Maiden
Maiden was a title of Athena; the name at first meant just one room of the temple and spread to the whole building only about a century later.
Q 12The Athena Parthenos statue was chryselephantine, meaning it was made of what?
Gold and ivory
Gold and ivory covered a wooden core, ivory for the goddess's skin and gold for the rest; the statue vanished in late antiquity and may have been carried off to Constantinople.
Q 13Which historian records an Athenian leader saying the gold on Athena's statue could be removed to save the city?
Thucydides
Thucydides gives the figure as forty talents of pure gold, about a tonne, in a speech made as Sparta prepared to invade; every ounce was to be repaid afterwards.
Q 21In the late sixth century AD the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church dedicated to whom?
The Virgin Mary
The building was turned to face east, an apse was added, and iconoclasts mutilated the metopes on three sides.
Q 22After the Ottoman conquest of Athens in the 1450s the Parthenon became what?
A mosque
A mosque it remained for some two centuries: a minaret rose at its south-west corner, and the building stayed largely intact until 1687.
Q 23Francesco Morosini, whose siege wrecked the Parthenon in 1687, went on to hold which office?
Doge of Venice
Doge of Venice from 1688, Morosini also looted the ancient marble lion of Piraeus, which still stands outside the Venetian Arsenal.
Q 14The Parthenon also served as the treasury of which alliance led by Athens?
The Delian League
The Delian League's treasury was moved from the island of Delos to Athens, and critics charged, by Plutarch's account, that the allies' war fund was being spent on adorning the city.
Q 15The best-preserved Parthenon metopes, on the south side, show Greeks fighting which mythical creatures?
Centaurs
Centaurs battle Greeks on the south side, the only one of the four that early Christians did not systematically deface, which is why these panels survive best.
Q 16The Parthenon's east metopes, above the main entrance, depict which mythical battle?
Gods against Giants
Gods against Giants filled the panels over the entrance, but early Christians hacked at them so thoroughly that many of the figures can no longer be identified.
Q 17The Parthenon's 160-metre frieze is usually read as the procession of which festival?
The Panathenaia
The Panathenaia was a real festival with mortal marchers, when temple sculpture normally showed myths, which is why some scholars look for a mythical reading instead.
Q 18The Parthenon is a Doric temple, but the continuous frieze around its inner building belongs to which order?
Ionic
Ionic friezes run unbroken instead of in separate panels; the Acropolis Museum now mounts this one lower than it sat on the temple, so visitors can see it properly.
Q 19Per Pausanias, the Parthenon's west pediment showed Athena's contest with which god?
Poseidon
Poseidon struck the Acropolis with his trident and, in the usual telling, brought forth a salt-water spring, but Athena was judged the winner and became the city's patron.
Q 20The Older Parthenon was still unfinished when which king's army burned the Acropolis in 480 BC?
Xerxes I
Xerxes I's army burned the half-built temple along with the rest of the Acropolis, and the site lay in ruins for 33 years before work began on the Parthenon we know.
Q 24What happened when Morosini's men tried to lower sculptures from the Parthenon's west pediment?
They fell and smashed
They fell and smashed on the ground, so what the pediment once looked like is known largely from drawings made thirteen years before the siege.
Q 25Agents of which British nobleman removed about half of the Parthenon's surviving sculptures in the early 1800s?
Lord Elgin
Lord Elgin, then ambassador to the Ottoman court, said its officials had given permission; the permit survives only in an Italian translation, and what it allowed is still disputed.
Q 26In 1816 Parliament bought the Parthenon marbles for £35,000 and gave them to which institution?
British Museum
The British Museum received them for about half of what the seller said their removal had cost him, after a parliamentary inquiry into how he had obtained them.
Q 27Which Romantic poet attacked the removal of the Parthenon sculptures to Britain as vandalism?
Byron
Byron mocked the removal in his bestseller Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and later died in Greece after joining its war of independence.
Q 28Greece took its demand for the return of the Parthenon marbles to which UN body in the 1980s?
UNESCO
UNESCO heard the demand in 1982, when culture minister Melina Mercouri, a former film star, made it at a conference in Mexico; its committee on returning cultural property later took up the case.
Q 29Which museum holds a single slab of the Parthenon frieze and one of its metopes?
Louvre
The Louvre's two pieces were collected by a painter working for the French ambassador, years before the far larger removals of the early 1800s.
Q 30After a Sicilian museum sent a Parthenon fragment home to Athens, which collection followed by returning three?
The Vatican
The Vatican Museums had held their three pieces for two centuries; Pope Francis framed the return as a personal donation to the Orthodox Archbishop of Athens.