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Parthenon.
    Six years after he had sold his collection, the noseless Lord Elgin was once again in Athens, facing the Parthenon. Or, rather, he was in Edinburgh, the Athens of the North, facing what he hoped would become the Parthenon. A monument to the fallen of the Napoleonic wars had been proposed several years before, and this monument was, at the behest of Lord Elgin and his friends, to take the exact form of the Parthenon. The whole thing was to be constructed for £42,000—only£7,000 more than what the House of Lords had paid for the sculptures that had adorned the original. Even so, the committee managed to raise only £16,000 for the project, and so the ten columns of the partially constructed Edinburgh Parthenon stand like a ruin in anticipation. Ever since work stopped in 1830 they have been known as “Edinburgh’s Disgrace.”
    So Lord Elgin, the man who had pulled apart the original Parthenon, now presided over the broken ruin of a replica. His disgrace was complete. He retired to his estates with a substantial collection of plaster casts, and what had once been the Temple of Wisdom he pondered in its fragmented, chalky derivative. The Parthenon—whose virgin goddess had been cast out, which had ceased to be useful as a building, and whose very stones had been scattered to the ends of the earth—had been ruined a third time.
    1834
     
    W HEN THE P ARTHENON was 2,267 years old, it was ruined for a fourth time. The new king of a new nation ascended the Acropolis to survey the treasures of which he was now the master. Otto von Wittelsbach was the ruler of a country that had never existed before. It had taken fourteen years of war for Greece to come into being, and in that war the ruins of the Parthenon had acquired the status of a talisman for a nation born of ancient nostalgia. The Acropolis was besieged twice during those fourteen years, and during one siege the Turks, searching for iron to make bullets, started to break open the remaining marbles of the temple, hoping to find the metal cramps with which ancients had bound the stones of the building together. The Greeks were so horrified at this violation that they sent their enemies a consignment of ammunition, so that they could continue the battle without despoiling the building.
    Once the country was free, the Greeks looked around them for a king. They found one in a younger son of the house of Bavaria, and a queen in his wife, the princess Amalia. Since there was no royal palace in Athens, many debates were held about how King Otto and Queen Amalia might live in the state befitting crowned heads of Europe. Perhaps inevitably, the people cast their eyes up to the ruined Parthenon;and, perhaps inevitably, the German king turned to an architect of his own race to provide him with all the comforts of home.
    Karl Friedrich Schinkel was the court architect of Prussia. He did not visit the Parthenon before designing his palace. He had already seen the stones of the Parthenon in London, and he had seen that aborted reconstruction in Edinburgh. He had studied Stuart and Revett, and he had read the classics. He knew all about the Parthenon. Indeed, Schinkel had already built a Parthenon or two at home in Prussia: a guardhouse on Unter den Linden in Berlin, the tomb of a Hohenzollern princess at Charlottenburg, a royal retreat for the crown prince of Prussia at Sans Souci. All of them were built in the Doric order of the Temple of Wisdom.
    Schinkel’s design for the Acropolis was to transform the decrepit remnants of the Ottoman garrison into a grandiose palace. The ancient gateway was to be restored; just as it had done once upon a time, it was to lead to a gigantic statue of Athene. Next there would be a forecourt in the form of a hippodrome, and then the palace itself would unfold: a filigree Alhambra of courtyards and colonnades and fountains, where the king and his queen, Amalia, who loved roses, could walk in the shade and look out over the ramparts at the