The Athenians never forgot—nor let anyone else forget—that it was they who had saved Greece at the Battle of Marathon and had once been the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean. Resplendent still upon the Acropolis, the Parthenon stood as a permanent memorial to the years of Athenian supremacy. All gone, though; long gone. In the list of the Seven Wonders of the World, composed in the century after Alexander’s death, the Parthenon was conspicuous by its absence. It was too small, too out of date, reflecting the presumptions of an age in which empires as well as monuments had grown
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