Around all four sides of the building, above the columns and easily seen by everybody approaching, was a series of 92 square relief carvings, known as metopes.
The struggle against the Centaurs that we see on the metopes becomes an emblem of the perpetual battle that, for the Athenians, every civilised state has to fight.
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.