This book poses a question: since, in encounters between the present and the past, the present always wins, how might we in the present recover the strangeness of a society that flourished two-and-a-half millennia ago? Can we find ways of throwing off our mind-forged manacles, and instead make an attempt, without preconceptions or agendas, to re-enfranchise those who commissioned, designed, received and used the Parthenon in the classical era by removing the weight of modern practices and traditions? In the chapters that follow, I explore such apparently simple questions as: Why was the classical Parthenon built? What was its purpose or purposes? Why did it take the form that it did? Why, as the eighteenth-century travellers noticed, was it over-engineered? Can we do more to release ourselves from traditions, whether admiring and co-opting (‘the highest point of civilization ever reached by humanity’; ‘men-like-ourselves’; ‘our debt to Greece and Rome’) or indignant (‘not all dead white men’)? Can we set to one side the influence of modern master narratives, whether they take the form of the arrival of evidence-based Enlightenment ideas or, more recently, of post-colonial theories that present local peoples as being deprived of ‘indigeneous’ ways of interacting with the monuments? Can we clear our minds of the suggestion that the Parthenon is ‘the very symbol of democracy itself?