Quick questions on The Periclean building program and the Acropolis: HSC Ancient History Athens

The Parthenon, the great Doric temple to Athena Parthenos ("Athena the Virgin"), was designed by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates and built between 447 and 438 BC, with its sculptural decoration completed by 432 BC. Phidias, appointed by Pericles as general overseer (epistates) of the whole building program (Plutarch, Pericles 13.4), both coordinated the project and personally sculpted its centrepiece: the Athena Parthenos, a chryselephantine (gold-and-ivory) cult statue widely estimated at around 11 to 12 metres tall, dedicated at the Panathenaea in 438 BC.

The Propylaea, the monumental marble gateway controlling access to the Acropolis, was designed by the architect Mnesicles and built 437-432 BC. Despite its scale, ambitious even by the program's standards, it was never finished as originally planned, most plausibly because labour and funds were redirected once the Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 BC.

The Erechtheion, an unusually irregular Ionic temple on the north side of the Acropolis, was built mostly c. 421-406 BC, largely after Pericles's death in 429 BC, as the delayed continuation of his program. It enclosed some of Athens's oldest and most sacred cult sites in a single building: the ancient olive-wood cult statue (xoanon) of Athena Polias, which received a new woven robe (peplos) at each Panathenaea; the mark said to be the strike of Poseidon's trident; and Athena's own sacred olive tree, the mythical prize in her contest with Poseidon depicted on the Parthenon's west pediment. Its south porch, the Porch of the Caryatids, replaced ordinary columns with six carved female figures (caryatids) supporting the roof.

The Athena Promachos ("Athena who fights in front") was a colossal free-standing bronze statue of Athena by Phidias, usually dated to the 450s BC, standing in the open air between the Propylaea and the Parthenon. Pausanias (Description of Greece 1.28.2), writing in the second century AD, records that it was funded from the spoils of the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) and that the tip of Athena's spear and the crest of her helmet were visible to ships as they rounded Cape Sounion, a claim that, whether or not exactly literal, communicates how the statue advertised Athenian military and naval power to every ship approaching the city.

Tragedy and comedy were performed competitively at the City Dionysia, Athens's major dramatic festival held each spring in honour of Dionysus at the Theatre of Dionysus on the Acropolis's south slope. The great tragedians of the mid-fifth century, Aeschylus (whose Oresteia trilogy was staged in 458 BC), Sophocles (whose Antigone is usually dated c. 441 BC; he also served as a general alongside Pericles during the Samian War, 440-439 BC), and Euripides (whose Medea was staged in 431 BC), each explored justice, the gods, and the state before audiences that could include allied representatives visiting for the festival. Comic poets performed Old Comedy at the same festivals; Cratinus, an older contemporary of Pericles, mocked the Odeion of Pericles, a covered concert hall built c.