Callicrates

Callicrates was one of the two architects of the Parthenon. He worked in Athens in the middle of the fifth century BC, during the building programme Pericles funded from the treasury of the Delian League, and the ancient sources name him alongside Ictinus as responsible for the temple, with Phidias supervising the sculpture and the scheme as a whole. How the work was divided between the two architects is not recorded, and has been argued over since antiquity. One suggestion is that Callicrates was the practical builder and contractor and Ictinus the designer; another that Callicrates had begun an earlier temple on the site, destroyed or abandoned after the Persian sack of 480 BC, and that the Parthenon was built partly on its foundations and reused its material. He is separately recorded as the architect of the small Ionic temple of Athena Nike on the bastion beside the Propylaea, and as having built one of the Long Walls connecting Athens to its port at Piraeus — which is engineering rather than temple design. The Parthenon's refinements are what the reputation rests on. There is almost no straight line in it: the stylobate curves upward towards the centre, the columns lean slightly inward and swell in the middle, and the corner columns are thicker and more closely spaced. Whether these correct optical distortion or are simply aesthetic is unresolved, and they were executed to a tolerance of a few millimetres in marble. Nothing is known of his life. The building stood essentially intact for two thousand years, and was wrecked in 1687 when a Venetian shell reached the Ottoman powder store inside it.

• Lived: 500 BCE – 430 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: intellectual