The Parthenon, by Mary Beard

Europe's ultimate monument is surrounded by a haze of myth. Michael Bywater tries to see it clearly

Before we even look at the text, the cover invites us to make judgements; and so becomes the epitome of this witty, humane and diligent book. Here is a picture, not of the Parthenon, but from the Parthenon, between two great capitals, as if seen by a child gazing through its mother's legs (or two trunkless legs of stone) at the world beyond, of rubble (ruin or restoration?), heat, smog and hills. And at ourselves, gazing back, wondering what it once was, and what it is, and whether what we think we feel is what we really feel, and if it is what we are meant to feel.

There, on the inside back flap, is a photograph of the author, herself the subject of a stony inanimate gaze, surrounded by heads of the ancients. There's Julius Caesar, there's Pompey, and there, down to the right, is ... well; it doesn't matter. It's a head; an idealised, "classical" head, possessed of symmetry, proportion, ideal beauty, and dispossessed of life. The others are not.

You would recognise plump, anxiously bullish Pompey if you met him in the forum. His illusory regard (topped by his deliberately antique hairdo, consciously recalling Alexander the Great) is appropriate as a reflection of the gaze Beard turns in turn upon the Parthenon.

Who is watcher, who is watched? Who is incorporating what past into what present? What do we see when we think we understand what we are looking at? How can we tell if our responses are genuine or pre-conditioned? And how can we approach something so universally praised as Pheidias's great Temple of Athena, the crowning glory of the Athenian Acropolis ... which the first real travel writer, Pausanias, hardly mentions?

Beard's Pausanias comes wonderfully to life, fussing and fretting about an Acropolis very different to the "bare rock ... with just a few isolated monuments dramatically silhouetted against a clear sky" that we see now. He remembers a story about Theseus's father, points to a group of Graces and explains how "everyone says" it was sculpted by Socrates ("much more likely the work of a second-division sculptor from Thebes, also called Socrates", says Beard). He "fusses over a small stone where, once upon a time, Silenus, one of the rowdy friends of the god Dionysus, was said to have stopped for a rest. And so the sights and stories flood out."

But Pausanias hardly mentions the Parthenon. He mentions the sculptures on the gables, but is mostly taken by a sculpture of Hadrian, the Roman Hellenophile emperor (and another man who looked back – to Greece – to look forward), and even more so by Pheidias's colossal chryselephantine statue of Athena, complete with statue of Victory, shield, spear and, of course, her son Erichthonios. Who was a snake.

"Why does Pausanias say nothing?" Mary Beard wonders. Having suggested a few possibilities, she says that his silence "should remind us just how difficult it is to reconstruct the way in which any ancient viewer saw the Parthenon, or what they made of what they saw." That, of course, is the crux, not only of this book, but of the whole question of our reception of the classics.

Appropriately, the Athena statue has been recreated in Nashville, Tennessee ... Already, with a snaky subtlety, Mary Beard has undermined all our assumptions about the Parthenon, beginning with the well-documented tendency of "sensitive" viewers to burst into tears at their first sight of it. With a few exceptions: Beard points out that the American novelist Walker Percy "fantasised about its total destruction under a massive Soviet attack" while William Golding sat with his back to it and enjoyed a view presumably much like that on the cover.

So much has been written about the Parthenon. And so much of what has been written seems to have been designed to demonstrate the fine sensibilities of the writers, so that there is little nourishment to be had there. This book, though, brings mezedes, those numberless little dishes which, without cloying the palate, add up to as fine a dinner as you could want.

Here's Pericles, and a digression on the Delian League; here are the ineluctably subdued city-states, complaining of tribute exacted and the "tricking out of Athens in the gewgaws of a whore" (according to Plutarch). Here, of course, is Lord Elgin, and the 1687 depredations of the Venetians under General Morosini, and the holding of Thermopylae by "three hundred heroic – or brainwashed – Spartans".

Here's the Turk Evliya giving a different perspective on the Parthenon in the 17th century, and claiming in passing that Athens was founded by Solomon. Here's Ludwig of Bavaria's 17-year-old son Prince Otto finding himself King of Greece in 1833, while back home his brother Maximilian "got together with his royal friend and amateur architect, Friedrich Wilhel of Prussia, and came up with the idea of putting the new royal palace on the Acropolis itself".

And here – for those who recall the storm which broke out last autumn when Mary Beard suggested in the usually harmless London Review of Books that the Americans had "had it coming" – is her judgement on the controversy surrounding the clandestine interventions of Joseph Duveen, which saw the sculptures in the British Museum allegedly being cleaned with copper tools and coarse carborundum:

"Never mind the condition of the sculptures left on the Parthenon itself, the Greeks and other supporters of the return of the [Elgin] marbles were bound to play Duveen's folly for all it was worth. Two centuries of British self-satisfaction had it coming."

For all its wit and accessibility, this is a grand tour d'horizon of this wonder of the world, and how it has been seen, argued and fought over, from its inception to our own modern times. A serious work, it brings impeccable scholarship to a wider audience, and passes the most difficult test of provoking metanoia, a change of mind. I will never look at the Parthenon again in the same way; and, having read The Parthenon, I want to see it again just as soon as I can.

At one point, Beard refers to the – possibly – Panathenaic procession on the frieze: "How, after all, would we recognise the correct 'solution' if we found it?" The question not only sums up the problem of our responses to the ancient world, but also offers the answer: we would not. Of course, we would not.

Sad? No. A liberation. Which is, after all, what thinking is meant to be for.