Cella Plan Set and Ionic Frieze Program Conceived

Once the base existed, the interior could be argued into shape. Iktinos and Kallikrates, working under Pheidias’ overarching eye, set the plan of the cella and made a daring choice: a continuous Ionic frieze would run around the interior, enfolding worshipers within a narrative band inside a fortress of triglyphs [4][11]. The decision made the Parthenon not just a Doric monument, but a dialogue of orders.

The cella had to hold the Athena Parthenos. Scale dictated space. Pliny’s later estimate for the statue—26 cubits—suggests a vertical ambition that the interior must answer [7]. So architects drew a grand naos flanked by a colonnade, an opisthodomos at the rear, and arranged circulation so that processions from the Propylaia could sweep into the pronaos and toward the statue’s gaze [11]. The space needed to be both ceremonial and navigable.

Vitruvius’ nod to a treatise by Iktinos and Carpion on the Doric temple of Athena shows that the architects thought their way through this synthesis in writing as well as stone [6]. The frieze would allow Pheidias to inscribe a narrative—commonly interpreted as a Panathenaic procession—inside the temple, a quiet, continuous counterpoint to the episodic drama of the exterior metopes [11]. This conceptual move turned the interior from void to voice.

On site, the choice changed work rhythms. Carvers would need steady light to chisel shallow relief on a continuous run. Foremen oriented scaffolding for access along the cella’s walls; a different set of calls echoed under the rising roof. The acoustics shifted from open-air hammering to enclosed tapping. Under the azure bowl of the Attic sky outside, inside there was shade and a cool, steady rasp.

Pheidias, in charge of the program, now had a canvas with two tempi. Outside, Doric discipline: triglyphs, metopes, pedimental triangles. Inside, Ionic flow: a band that could hold horses, elders, and maidens in a long rhythm of civic devotion [11]. The blend served politics. Athens could claim both the strength of the Doric order and the sophistication of Ionic narrative in one building.

The choice also committed the city to an intensive carving campaign. A continuous frieze requires continuity of labor and quality across tens of meters. The accounts would, in time, reflect payments to sculptors whose hands gave stone that quiet surface pulse [1]. But here, at conception, the event is intellectual: an architectural decision to break the boundaries of an order without breaking its effect.

As the plan left the tablet and entered the walls, the temple’s heart found its form. The Doric shell would stand for the city’s authority; the Ionic frieze would show its life. Iktinos and Kallikrates set up that duet. Pheidias would conduct it.