The Parthenon Frieze

The standard academic monograph on the design and iconography of the Parthenon frieze, the continuous sculpted band that ran around the exterior of the cella wall of the Parthenon in Athens. Its strength is that it is the accepted scholarly reference for what the frieze depicts and how its program was organized. Its limit is that, like any single interpretive study of contested ancient iconography, its reading of what particular scenes represent is one scholar's argued synthesis, weighed against real ongoing debate among classicists about the frieze's precise subject.