Freedom poster promoting President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four freedoms: of expression, of religion, from want and from fear. Showing torch from the Statue of Liberty. Silkscreen. Work Projects Administration Poster Collection (Library of Congress). Exhibited in: American Responses to Nazi Book Burning, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., 2003. Public Domain

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........

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