High atop the Acropolis in Athens, Greece stands one of the most magnificent and most aesthetically pleasing structures in the world, the Parthenon. This 23,000 square foot temple was constructed using 100,000 tons of radiant white marble. The exterior of the Parthenon is lined with 46 colossal columns, which strikingly appear to be laid out in the shape of an exact rectangle. And what's more astonishing is that the more than 13,000 stone blocks used to assemble the Parthenon were precisely fitted together without the use of mortar. Which begs the question, how were the ancient Greeks able to build something that looks so perfect?
The Parthenon is an amazingly beautiful structure. The design, the spacing of each stone is so perfect. perfect that it inspires just to look at. The proportions are so exact.
For a large building, it is an amazing thing, and it lifts the spirit upward. Built beginning in 447 BC on the orders of the famed statesman and general Pericles, the Parthenon celebrates the Athenians' victory over Persian invaders who had tried to conquer the city for 50 years. Athens, during the time of the building of the Parthenon, is an incredible cosmopolitan, vibrant city.
It's producing art, literature, sculpture, architecture. It's the Manhattan of the fifth century BC. And I think if you're an Athenian citizen walking, doing your everyday work, And then you see the Acropolis in the center of the city, this incredible shining hill.
And then you see the Parthenon, the gleaming marble, the biggest and most beautiful Greek temple that existed at least in mainland Greece at this point. You'd be filled with a sense of wonder. Although most of the interior of the Parthenon has decayed due to the ravages of time, the rectangular symmetry of its exterior looks flawless to this day. But strangely, for a temple that was clearly built with perfection in mind, what makes the Parthenon so fascinating is actually its imperfections.
Not only were the Greeks masters of geometry, they were also masters of optical illusions. They knew the fact that your eye plays tricks on you. Therefore, they built the Parthenon slightly incorrectly, quote-unquote, to compensate for this so that the net result is perfection. The Parthenon is a rectangle, but there are no right angles in the entire building.
Everything is slightly off. The columns look straight from below, but they are slightly tilted toward each other. So if you were standing at the base of the Parthenon, and if the columns didn't stop after a certain number of feet, but they kept on going all the way up into the sky, you would see the columns meeting if they were long enough to actually meet. This is a very curious thing that the builders did.
It turns out that the Parthenon does not have straight parallel lines at all. The columns are not... vertically cylindrical at all. They bulge by about an inch at the center of the cylinder. So, for example, if the human brain, looking at a column, will actually think that the waist is pinched, your eye thinks that the center of the cylinder is shrunk.
To compensate for that, the columns of the Parthenon bulge. There's no way this could have been an accident. But is that all the Greeks were trying to achieve? An optical illusion?
Or could they have had another purpose in mind when they built the Parthenon? Why do we create monuments like the Parthenon? And the answer is, we want to try and imitate the divine. The divine was seen as perfection.
The gods are seen as perfection. And so sacred geometry has been incorporated. into the Parthenon in the belief that it was now endowed with some kind of divine power.
And this was done very specifically to connect the mundane with the divine, to create the connection between this world and the next.