Untouched by Time: The Beauty and Vision of Freedom

Prologue

The Roosevelt poster on freedom is timeless. I thought about its message while on the Parthenon. In early October 2025, I was on the Acropolis admiring the Parthenon, its beauty and architectural perfection. The Athenians built the Parthenon to celebrate their victories over the Persians in 490 and 480 and 479 BCE, decisive victories of the united Greeks for freedom. The Athenians called the temple Parthenon in honor of Athena Parthenos, Virgin Athena, daughter of Zeus.

The Parthenon

The Parthenon and Athena were the personification of philosophy, wisdom, craftsmanship, beauty and freedom. That vision of freedom, and its expression in the Library of Congress poster, embraced me head to toe. A near-flawless monument to architecture, science, and engineering, the Parthenon is a timeless symbol of the contributions of the ancient Greeks to a new model for the understanding of the natural world through reason, measurement, and scientific technology. Built in the fifth century BCE, this iconic temple is the creative progenitor of the Antikythera Mechanism of genius of the second century BCE.

As if to confirm the perfection of the Parthenon, there came into being Plato, a moral philosopher who taught Aristotle, who invented science, and taught Alexander the Great. Between the Parthenon, Plato, and Aristotle there’s a tradition of technology, philosophy, and scientific theory that led the Greeks to the Alexandrian Era and the Antikythera astronomical computer.

Alexander Tzonis, professor of architectural theory at the University of Technology, Delft, Holland, connects the building of the Parthenon to the advancement of science. Tzonis reports that the change that took place in Greece between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE was epoch-making. He wrote: “Greece produced a new way of constructing and construing the world, which was unprecedented in its systematic rigor and embedded with new disciplinary institutions. There was no place for falsehood or accident in this system” (Alexander Tzonis and Phoebe Giannisi, Classical Greek Architecture: The Construction of the Modern (Paris: Flammarion, 2004) 184).

Polytheism, natural philosophy, and advanced craftsmanship culminated in an extremely sophisticated form of sculpture, architecture, and city planning of the classical age. Poleis (city-states) filled with thousands of statues and dozens of great temples, including the Parthenon in Athens. How the Greeks constructed the Parthenon has yet to be understood, much less surpassed.

Building the Parthenon was, first of all, a massive public works project. Ploutarchos has something to say about the Parthenon. He lived from about 46 to 120 in our era. He was a Greek polymath, philosopher, prolific writer, and priest of Apollo. He wrote almost six centuries after the Athenians built the Parthenon. He left a few clues of what and who made the Parthenon possible. He reported that the materials used for the construction of the Parthenon included marble, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony, and cypress wood. The technicians who shaped these materials to form the Parthenon included carpenters, molders, bronzesmiths, stonecutters, dyers, gold and ivory experts, painters, embroiderers, and embossers. Add to these rope makers, weavers, leather workers, road builders, and miners. Then there were sailors and pilots who carried the marble by land and sea and trainers and drivers of yoked animals that did other indispensable work. All in all, some 200 craftsmen and 50 sculptors built the Parthenon. We still use the tools they used.

Ploutarchos also says that the builders of the Parthenon tried to outdo themselves in the beauty of their handiwork, which was inimitable in its perfection and grandeur. Ploutarchos was equally effusive in his praises of Pericles under whose leadership and administration the Parthenon came into being. The works of Pericles, he said, were done “in a short time for all time.”

Each one of those works was so fresh, vigorous, and beautiful that, according to Ploutarchos, it was at once ancient; in fact, each work like the Parthenon looked as if “untouched by time. The ever-green breath of an ageless soul was infused into the works of Pericles” (Ploutarchos, Pericles 12.6–7, 13.1–3).

A philhellene, the French philosopher Ernest Renan, visited the Acropolis in 1865 and, like Ploutarchos, fell in love with the beauty and sacredness of the Parthenon. He saw the ideal crystallized in Pentelic marble. He admitted that “Greece had created science, art, philosophy and civilization; but the scale failed me. When I saw the Acropolis, I have had the revelation of the divine.” In addition, Renan equated the beauty of the Parthenon with “absolute honesty,” reason, and the respect Greeks had towards their gods. He said the hours he spent on the Acropolis were “hours of prayer” to Athena Pallas (Ernest Renan, Prayer on the Acropolis, tr. by Xenophon Dantis (Athens: Dionysios Petsalis, 1962) 15–26).

The American classics scholar, Jon D. Mikalson, found divine origins in Greek architecture. He spoke about the “inclination” of the Greeks “to give to their gods only what was beautiful. The result of such a relationship, he concluded, “filled their cities and villages, the richer ones more than the poorer ones, with temples, statues, and dedications of unsurpassed beauty.” Then Mikalson added: “Most of what we think of as characteristically Greek in architecture, sculpture, mythology, lyric poetry, tragedy, and comedy owed its origins and, especially in the Classical period, its development, to the religious institutions and practices of the Greek people. The cultural environment in which the Greek individual lived, whether in Athens or Sparta or Thebes, was significantly determined by his religion and that of his ancestors” (Jon D. Mikalson, Ancient Greek Religion, Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 196).

The Parthenon was an embodiment of Greek religion. Like an ageless celestial mirror, the Parthenon also has been reflecting the dazzling power, artistic achievements, and technical knowledge of Athens, the premier Greek polis in the fifth century BCE.

Cosmos Within a Cosmos

Careful observation of the Parthenon shows that there are no straight lines or right angles in the building. Instead, its architecture incorporates and takes advantage of deviations from the perfectly vertical or horizontal. The columns are a striking example of these virtues. The Parthenon looks like it responds under its own weight: The steps curve upward, the columns swell slightly in the middle and tilt inward while the metopes, panels adorned with sculpture, tilt outward. The corner columns are a little bit thicker than the rest of the columns. The overall impression in looking at the Parthenon is one of beauty and harmony.

Jeffrey Hurwit, professor of history at the University of Oregon, thinks the harmony of the Parthenon “is dependent on a certain mathematical system of proportions.” But the harmony of the Parthenon comes from values complementing mathematics. The Parthenon is more than a building.

The Parthenon is a sculpture resembling the human body, which explains all those deviations from the perfectly mathematical. Hurwit puts it like this: “These deviations from the straight, from the perpendicular, from the perfectly vertical, from the perfectly horizontal are analogous to the curvatures and the swellings and the irregularities of the human body. And in that sense, the Parthenon strikes me as being a sculptural as well as an architectural achievement” (November 2007 interview of Jeffrey Hurwit by Gary Glassman, producer of “Secrets of the Parthenon,” WGBH, NOVA, PBS).

Lothar Haselberger, professor of Roman architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, calls the refinements of curvature “delicate deviations from strict regularity.” These refinements went into the building of nearly all Greek temples after the Persian Wars. Their purpose was making the building shape “its own life and truthful presence. This truth could lie in a bent structure, yet never in deceptively bending the truth” (Lothar Haselberger, “Bending the Truth: Curvature and Other Refinements of the Parthenon” in The Parthenon: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jenifer Neils (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 101–157).

Alexander Tzonis sees the “intentional deviations from regularity” as a striking refinement in the architecture of the Parthenon. In addition, he sees the triumph of reason in its construction:

“The orderly arrangement – the spacing and shaping – of the columns [of the Parthenon] reinforced the visual discontinuity, thereby generating a vibrant ‘illusory-contour’ that set the edifice, as an individual entity, apart from its surroundings…. It created a temenos [sacred precinct for a temple] – no longer in a purificatory, but rather in a cognitive sense. It made a ‘kosmos within kosmos,’ or ‘world within the world,’ free of pollution and spatial anomalies. More significantly, by erecting a colonnade and arranging the interior components of the building in a coherent way, this was a major step in the pursuit towards the formation of a coherent system of architectural thinking and spatial reasoning,” he wrote (Tzonis and Giannisi, Classical Greek Architecture, 111, 190).

Edith Hamilton, a British classical scholar of the early twentieth century, would have congratulated Tzonis. She, too, saw the perfection of Greek civilization in the Parthenon. She wrote:

“In the Parthenon straight columns rise to plain capitals; a pediment is sculptured in bold relief; there is nothing more. And yet – here is the Greek miracle – this absolute simplicity of structure is alone in majesty of beauty among all the temples and cathedrals and palaces of the world. Majestic but human, truly Greek. No superhuman force as in Egypt; no strange supernatural shapes as in India; the Parthenon is the home of humanity at ease, calm, ordered, sure of itself and the world” (Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way to Western Civilization (New York: The New American Library, 1957) 45–46).

Freedom for ever

We already connected the Parthenon to freedom. All the temples on the Acropolis reflect freedom. The sophisticated craftsmanship and science behind these buildings represent the confidence of Athens for defeating the largest empire of the fifth century BCE, Persia. Athena reigned on the Acropolis. The surviving small temple of Athena-Nike (Victory / Freedom) testifies the connection of these Acropolis architectural marvels to freedom

Athena-Nike (Victory / Freedom) Temple on the Acropolis. Photo: Alexander Poplov. Wikipedia Creative Commons.Pheidias, the great fifth century BCE Athenian sculptor, supervised the construction of a beautiful statue of Athena Parthenos, which survived for centuries in the Temple of the Parthenon. In 484, the Christian Emperor Zeno inflicted the first major blow against the Parthenon. He pillaged the chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos by Pheidias and his craftsmen.

The looting of the Parthenon by invading barbarians and Christian and Moslem rulers of Greece — and even scholars — was systematic and lasted for centuries – to this day. That looting of the Acropolis spread to ancient Greece. The destruction of ancient Greece turned the country to a dark-age colony of foreigners who despised the Hellenes and their polytheistic culture. This long oppression exploded in 1821 into a revolution for the recovery of freedom. The example of the scholar Adamantios Koraes exemplifies the centuries of degradation that Greece endured because the new Christian and Islamic orders did not tolerate real polytheist Greeks in their midst.

I remember Adamantios Koraes, 1748-1833. He defined freedom as vision. I wrote my doctoral thesis on his work. He earned his medical degree at the University of Montpellier and spent the remaining years of his life in Paris publishing ancient Greek works of enlightenment, science and freedom.

In 1800, Koraes addressed European scientists by editing the seminal environmental and scientific work of Hippokrates Περί Αέρων Υδάτων, Τόπων / On Airs, Waters, Places, with a lengthy introduction in French. Koraes highlighted Hippokrates’ firm conviction of how important a healthy natural world of clean waters and air and land were for human health and wellbeing. Hippokrates invented scientific medicine in the fifth century BCE.

In 1806, he published anonymously in Livorno, Italy, a paean on freedom, which he called Hellenic Nomarchia / Nomarchy / Rule of Law. The subtitle of the book was A Speech on Freedom.

The Hellenic Nomarchia was a great Philippic against Turkish tyranny and its subsidiary, the Orthodox clergy. The book described the degrading and fatal effects of slavery the Turks and their assistants, the Orthodox clergy, imposed on the Greek people. Koraes called the monks monsters. He wrote that living in Turkish occupied Greece meant living perpetually hungry and facing death every day of the year. By walking in a Greek village or town, he said, “You would sense “murmurs of sorrow, a silence of hopelessness, coldness of heart, terror, the gallows, and death” (30). Nomarchia / Nomarchy urged the Greeks to kill the Turks and win their freedom. Koraes claimed that the Rule of Law was by far the best guardian of freedom. He urged the Greeks to break their chains of tyranny and slavery as fast as they could, so they would win their freedom. He told them that freedom was vision, everything that they valued was made possible by freedom.

The book of Koraes on the Rule of Law, philosophical, patriotic, enlightening, political and revolutionary, prepared the ground for the Greek revolutionary Society of Friends and the Greek Revolution.

The texts Koraes edited during the Greek Revolution had insights and wisdom on winning military battles and struggles in political and social life. These texts include: the Politics (1821) and Nicomachean Ethics (1822) of Aristotle; the Strategikos (Strategics, 1822) of the Platonic philosopher Onesander who flourished during the first century; the 1764 Traito dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments), which Koraes edited in 1823. This was the work of the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria; Koraes also edited Plato’s insightful political and ethical dialogue, Gorgias (1825), and the equally powerful political treatise of Xenophon, Memorabilia (1825). Both Plato and Xenophon were students of Socrates and earned their wisdom from the misfortunes of the Greek civil war known as the Peloponnesian War. Koraes then edited the Oration Against Leokrates (1826) by the Athenian orator and statesman Lykourgos who lived after the Peloponnesian War and during the supremacy of Macedonia. Lykourgos accused Leokrates of treason for his pro-Macedonian views. Next Koraes edited the Encheiridion (Handbook) (1826) and Lectures (1827) of Epiktetos, a Greek Stoic philosopher who lived under Roman rule, 50-120. Epiktetos preached practical wisdom and universal brotherhood. In 1822, Koraes wrote his own commentary on the Constitution of Epidauros, and, in 1831, he published Sacerdotal Handbook, in which he summarized his understanding of Orthodox Christianity. In addition, he wrote a five-volume study of the Greek language, which came down to us under the title Atakta (Miscellaneous Notes, 1828-1835).

The Greek Revolution was a ray of light all the way from the Parthenon and Athena Parthenos. The beaty and freedom of Athena Parthenos captured the imagination of the civilized world.

Athena Parthenos even reached the State of California in the United States.

Conclusion

As for modern Greece, freedom remains the oxygen of the people, though corrupt and foreign purchased leadership cares less about ancient Greece, the Parthenon or freedom. Add to that, the NATO and European Union, where modern Greece is a member, don’t exactly respect Greece. They prefer jihadist Islamic Turkey over Christian Greece. They cultivate centuries-old delusions that Turkey will become the fodder for any war against Russia. And they resent Greece for its superpower culture. Their money and power have threatened Greece repeatedly during the 2 centuries of independent Greece: always preferring Turkey and making certain Greece continues to be mired in poverty and dependence. They led Greece into Turkey in 1919 and at the same time befriended Kemal, thus wrecking the entire Greek project of recovering at least Smyrna. Then in WWII, despite the victory of the Greeks during the Italian Greek war, October 28, 1940 – April 1941. The British made certain impoverished if courageous Greece would fight Hitler’s Germany.

My hope is that with the increasingly dire anthropogenic global dangers, the virtues of reason and science of Hellenic culture will, once more, rise to the surface, what with the millions of tourist that visit and love the country. Moreover, scholars all over the planet study Hellenic culture. Greek remains an inexhaustible source for science, philosophy, and political theory and freedom. Countless visitors and scholars of Hellenic culture are the ambassadors for understanding the genius of Hellenic science and civilization. And the Greeks in Greece are trying to get rid of their corrupt government. The freedom flying out of the Parthenon and Athena Parthenos and Roosevelt’s poster are working together to make freedom permanent the world over.

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