The Parthenon: Democracy's Monument in a Slave-Holding City

Nashville built a full-scale replica of the Athenian Parthenon in eighteen ninety-seven for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. The original was intended to be temporary, plaster and wood over a timber frame, an exposition centerpiece that would be removed after the fair. The public refused to let it come down. For thirty-four years it sat there, weathering slowly, until the city finally rebuilt it in permanent concrete between nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty-one.

Inside the rebuilt Parthenon stands a forty-two-foot gilded replica of the ancient statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warfare, which is described as the largest indoor sculpture in the Western Hemisphere.

Nashville had been calling itself the Athens of the South since the antebellum period. The nickname referred to the concentration of universities and colleges in the city, a self-conscious civic identification with classical learning and democratic ideals. The irony was, and was widely noted by historians, that the city cultivating this identity as a seat of democratic learning was also a city whose economy rested substantially on the labor of enslaved people.

The Parthenon that tourists visited in the eighteen nineties sat in a city that was simultaneously constructing the legal architecture of Jim Crow. The statue of Athena that still stands inside the rebuilt building was completed in nineteen ninety, paid for by private donations from Nashville citizens. The goddess of wisdom presides over a city that has been working out, for two centuries, the distance between the ideals it claimed and the practices it maintained.

The Parthenon is free to walk around. The interior charges a small admission. The statue is worth seeing simply for its scale.