Chapter 12
Along with the Parthenon, the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion was one of the major monuments of the Golden Age of Athens. Built in 440 BCE, on the site of an earlier temple which had been destroyed by Persian forces under the command of Xerxes. The temple, which employed the standard rectangular layout, stood upon a steep promontory jutting out like a stubby finger poking into the Aegean Sea, forty-three miles south of Athens. Most of that temple was gone—just fifteen of the original thirty-four Doric columns remained standing on the crest of Cape Sounion looking out over Poseidon’s domain. From the deck of the yacht, some two hundred feet below and a quarter of a mile away, the columns looked like the rib cage of an ancient leviathan, hurled up onto the bluff, and stripped of al
