Maggie's Farm

It would still be just as built, with the 35' tall gold and ivory statue of the goddess in the inner sanctum, had the Hellenes not gotten into the culturally suicidal internecine war with Sparta, and instead kept a strong defense and continued to build trade. Most of the damage to the building happened when it was 90% of its current age, anyway. Turks, or someone fighting them, had their gunpowder stores inside, and a lucky enemy shot touched it off. A worse travesty even than Napoleon's arty officers shooting up the face of the sphinx just for fun.

--i too was thinking about him. He's a talented filmmaker and of course a hard lefty. Here he laments the centuries of foreign depredations upon the Parthenon, and i betcha he's never once read the political messages in the works of such as Thucydides, Livius, Xenophon and others detailing how the descent of the Golden Era was due to the change in the polity --attitudes and behavior moving from early conservatism during the rise (set as the Battle of Thermopylae) to prosperity and power, then to what we would call left-wing politics during the decay and collapse following the Peloponnesian Wars.

IOW, what ruined the Parthenon is what ruined the Hellenes, and what ruined the Hellenes was the advent of the contemporary versions of Costa-Gavras.