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It’s a passionate debate in which everyone has a view; but I want to focus on one sculpture in particular, and what that sculpture meant to the people who made it and looked at it in Athens in the fifth century BC.

The Parthenon sculptures set out to present an Athenian universe made up of gods, heroes and mortals, woven together in complex scenes drawn from myth and daily life. They are some of the most moving and uplifting sculptures ever made. They’ve become so familiar, and have shaped so much of European thinking, that it’s hard now to recover their original impact. But at the time of their making they were a quite new vision of what it meant, intellectually and physically, to be human and, indeed, Athenian. They’re the first, and supreme, achievements of a new visual language. Olga Palagia, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Athens, puts them in perspective:

The idea of the new style was to create a new equilibrium between the human body, human movement and the garments … The object was to achieve the perfect proportions of the human body. The key words for the new Classical style were harmony and balance – that is why the sculptures of the Parthenon are so timeless, because the figures they created are indeed timeless.

The sculptures were, however, made at a particular time and with a particular purpose. They sum up how this society thought about itself. The Parthenon was a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena Parthenos, meaning Athena the Virgin. It was built on the Acropolis – a rocky citadel at the heart of the city, with a central hall that housed a colossal statue of the goddess herself, made of gold and ivory. And everywhere there was sculpture.

Around all four sides of the building, above the columns and easily seen by everybody approaching it, was a series of ninety-two square relief carvings, known as metopes. Like all the other sculpture in the building, these would originally have been brightly coloured in red and blue and gold; it’s one of these metopes, now without its colour, that I have chosen as our object through which to think about Athens around 440 BC.

The metopes are all about battles – battles between the Olympian gods and the Giants, between Athenians and Amazons, and, in the ones I want to focus on, between Lapiths and Centaurs. The figures are almost free-standing, and the human ones are rather more than a metre (about 4 feet) tall. Centaurs – half-horse, half-human – are attacking the Lapiths, who are a legendary Greek people. According to the story, the Lapiths made the mistake of giving the Centaurs wine at the marriage feast of their king. The Centaurs got horribly drunk and attempted to rape the women, while their leader tried to carry off the bride. A bitter general battle ensued, and the Lapiths – the Greeks – were ultimately victorious over their half-animal Centaur enemies.

This sculpture is particularly moving; there are only two figures – a Centaur rearing triumphantly over a fallen Lapith, who lies dying on the ground. As with so many of the Parthenon sculptures, this one is damaged, and we can no longer see the expression in the dying Lapith’s face, or the aggression in the eyes of the Centaur. Nonetheless, it remains a wonderful and moving piece of sculpture. But what does it mean? And how can it sum up, in itself, a view of the Athenian state?

We are fairly certain that these sculptures are using myths to present a heroic version of recent events. A generation before the sculptures were made, Athens was one of several fiercely competitive city-states, forced into a coalition with each other by the Persian invasion of the Greek mainland. So, in the metopes, when we see Greeks fighting Centaurs, these mythical battles stand proxy for the real-life struggle between Greeks and Persians. The classicist Mary Beard, from the University of Cambridge, explains what the sculptures would have meant to the people who first saw them:

Ancient