Project 4
The Parthenon and Its Symbolic Meanings
Learning Goal: Identify and assess selected artifacts and monuments within their cultural contexts.
Literacy: Visual
Situated on the Acropolis, the Parthenon is a proud monument of fifth century BCE Athens steeped in values and meaning of the time period. The Parthenon, particularly its frieze, metopes, and order demonstrate many Athenian values but principally those of pride, piety, community.
"Though all aspects of the Parthenon carry meaning to the Athenians, the use of the Doric order with Ionic elements, the Amazonomachy and the centauromachy, the depiction of the Panathenaic festival, and the depiction of gods all characterize the important values of religious servitude, pride in military conquest, and community."
This assignment was for Classical World, an introductory course that gives broad overviews of Greece and Rome. For this essay, I chose to write on the Parthenon and its symbolic values for Athenians. For me, this piece was successful, and much of that is due to the wide breadth of information about the Parthenon that exists. As one of the most important buildings for ancient Greeks, the Parthenon has been long studied, and I enjoyed researching all of the intricacies of the building.
In terms of success, I think this paper was successful in that it was a small building block of what made me a Classics major.
This paper was not a cumulative assignment meant to show what we had learned over the course of the semester but a short research paper about a famous monument in Greece. I wanted to showcase a couple of these smaller works because I feel like they are a large part of who I am as a Classics major. In that sense, this helped me cement my prior convictions as to what I wanted to learn and accomplish as a Classics major. If I could redo this assignment, I would want keep a majority of the assignment, but I think that I’ve improved a bit as a writer since then, so there are small edits that I could make overall to improve the paper.