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village the Byzantine citadel was brought to light, and under that the Roman sanctuary, and under that the pavement once trod by Pericles and Phidias. By removing her history, the archaeologists attempted to restore the virginity of the Parthenon.
    In 1894, when they had nearly finished, there was a terrible earthquake, and the marble columns of the Parthenon were thrown to the ground. The archaeologists surveyed the ruins of the ruins, and then they started to restore the virginity of the Parthenon all over again. They collected the pieces of architrave, the fluted column drums, and the capitals that lay around the remains of the Parthenon—those stones that had survived barbarian sack, Christian and Muslim iconoclasm, explosion, the lime kiln, and expropriation to the museum halls of northern Europe; and with this jumbled heap of broken fragments they set to work. Column drum was placed upon column drum, and then capital, architrave, metope, triglyph, and cornice.
    By the end of the 1920s the peristyle of the Parthenon was almost complete. What was more, this had largely been achieved without resorting to adding new building material. The stones of the Parthenon were, it could truly be said, the same ones that had been touched by the hand of Phidias and gazed upon by the eye of Pericles. Nikolaos Balanos, the government’s director of antiquities, could justifiably claim to have restored the Parthenon to a state of integrity that it had not enjoyed since the explosion of 1687.
    But when the workmen undertook the restoration of the building, they overlooked, or ignored, how perfect it had been, once upon a time. The Parthenon in her virginity had never been a mere building but a body, as refined, as whole, as strong, and as flexible as the bodies of the heroes whose divine struggle once ornamented her skin. Herrefinements were almost imperceptible to the naked eye, but their consequence is that each and every stone in the Parthenon could have only one home: no stone will fit precisely into any place other than that which had been intended for it by Phidias himself.
    As they labored over their heap of broken fragments in the heat of the day, the restorers of the Parthenon had forgotten these things. Their rebuilt Parthenon might have looked very like the original Parthenon, but it was not perfect; and because it was not perfect, it was not the Parthenon.
    T HE P RESENT
     
    I N 1975, A group of archaeologists, conservationists, and technologists met in Athens. Above their seminar room the remains of the Parthenon were crumbling as fast as the meeting could deliberate. There was not much time.
    Lord Byron had wished that Lord Elgin would leave the Parthenon alone and allow it to dissolve into the rain and the air. His wish was coming true. Athens, which was once a village on the Acropolis, now stretched from Pentelikon, where the marble that built the Parthenon had been quarried, to Piraeus, from which its sculptures had been shipped to London. Traffic fumes choked the vast city and poisoned the rain that fell on the Acropolis. The fragments of the restored Parthenon were held together by iron clamps that had been inserted into the columns. Before long, the iron began to rust in the poisoned air; and as it did so, it expanded. As it expanded, it cracked the white marble that contained it, and shards fell away from the substance of the building. Dark red stains dribbled down a surface that had once dazzled in the antique air. The restoration of the Parthenon threatened, quite literally, to tear the building apart. Furthermore, the marble was being transformed by the rain into gypsum, molecule by molecule. The ruins of the Parthenon were turning into the same plaster in which it had been cast by its eighteenth-century admirers; and then it was quite simply being washed away.
    The committee listened to proposals to remove the remains altogether and replace them with a fiberglass replica. They discussed banning traffic around the