Hellenistic and Roman Athens

One of the cool things about archeology is that human settlements are like layer cakes, especially the older ones. In antiquity, back before the days of backhoes and subterranean power lines, it was almost always easier to replace earlier ruins by leaving them intact and covering them with dirt until you had a level enough surface to build new things on. Troy, for example, has nine layers over about 2900 years, stacked one on top of the other. This presents some problems, though, most notably that you have to dig through the old stuff to get to the older stuff beneath it. At Troy, Heinrich Schliemann (Remember him?) dug right through what we now think was Homer's Troy (whatever the implies about the truth of the Iliad) because he was in a hurry and figured he'd find Priam's palace or something if he just dug deeper. This is also why you tend to see so many Classical ruins in Greece, because up until fairly recently excavators would rip up Hellenistic stuff on top of it because the earlier layers were valued more.

But all this is only generalization, and in some places you'll find the same ground level used for various eras, which can be a mixed blessing. For example, the middle of the Athenian agora is mostly an unintelligible mess to the layman because of how overcrowded the space is by Classical, Hellenistic and early Roman ruins. But the bright side is that, in 21st century Athens, you get a chance to experience a more representative sample of history.

Athens is mostly famous for the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, which started off with them besting the Persians at Marathon, Salamis and Plateia, although the city itself was annihilated after a mass evacuation. Afterward, though, the Athenians rebuilt, and the following two centuries produced all of the following: the Parthenon, Socrates and Plato, Xenophon (another of Socrates' students, overshadowed by Plato in philosophy but also a writer of history, historical fiction, hunting manuals aimed at dog owners, and a travelogue involving 10,000 Greek mercenaries in the middle of Mesopotamia, who have to get out of the heart of the Persian empire after a failed bid to overthrow its new king), the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes, the political careers of Thucydides, Pericles and the birth of direct democracy, and all of those other reasons your teachers told you why you should care about the ancient Greeks. This came to a pretty nasty conclusion: 30 years of bloody war between Athens and it's "allies" and Sparta and it's "allies", ending in Athens' defeat and a short-lived end of democracy. The polis bounced back over the following decades, but was prevented from dominating Greece by the rise of the Macedonians to the north. After being effectively conquered by Alexander the Great, the Athenians took another shot at relevancy after he died only to be put in their place by the Macedonian general Antipater. After this, Athens settled into its new role as a college town for the rest of antiquity. Essentially, wealthy young Greeks and Romans would come to town to catch themselves a philosopher or orator to study under before setting off on a political career. The up side for Athens is that wealthy alumni and men who wanted to appear to be great patrons of culture would build them neat stuff. One of these men was King Attalus of Pergamon, who built them a neat stoa that has been restored and turned into the Agora Museum. Another, even better one, was Hadrian, one of Rome's better emperors.

Hadrian is most famous for a grand tour of Rome's provinces and the neat things he had built during and after it. The most impressive of these, at least in Athens, is the Temple of Olympian Zeus. I guess it's slightly uncool that it wasn't Hadrian's idea. It was originally started way back in the Archaic period by Pisistratus and his sons, the tyrants of Athens, but daddy died and his sons were booted out of town before the project was finished. The democracy ignored the project, and eventually King Antiochus IV (ruler of most of modern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and bits of several other countries) picked it up 375ish years later. He died before it could be completed, and progress went backward, if anywhere, until Hadrian had it completed, 675ish years after construction started. So nevermind, it was entirely cool.
It's really big. Here's a close-up of Dan and I in front of it. If the photo quality looks a little low, it's because the shot's zoomed in on my wimpy camera. Here's the real shot.
There are 15 giant columns still standing, and a 16th on the ground. Most of the original 104 are scattered around Athens, having been broken up for building material for houses, churches, and, in at least one case, a mosque. Although this makes for a good photo op, it mostly brings to mind a certain poem of Shelley's: "Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair."

It was nice to finally get to see the temple up close, since we walked past it every time we went into downtown Athens. It's just off the road, shielded a bit by some trees. Down that street a little we'd come to a major road, and stand next to another of Hadrian's monuments waiting for the stoplight. This is the appropriately named Arch of Hadrian. It came with an inscription that sums up the extent of his building projects around the newer parts of the city. On the side facing the ancient downtown area, it reads: "This is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus." On the side facing the newer, mostly Roman-era development, including the Temple of Olympian Zeus, it reads: "This is the city of Hadrian, not Theseus."

Next up: the Roman agora. By the time their Roman overlords decided that republics are overrated, the original Athenian agora was filling up. Between Pericle's junk, Hellenistic junk (like that Attalid stoa), and Roman junk ("Eheu! Our Revered and Divine Emperor has given us a statue of himself. Where can we put this to best suck up to him?" "Just dump it in the agora with the other 20.") it was getting increasingly difficult to use the marketplace for, your know, marketplace stuff. So the Athenians cleared out a spot which, while not exactly downtown, was within what Hadrian might call "The Thesus Zone" and set up shop. There's not a whole lot left of it, and most of that is of the "generic ruins" variety, and I'm writing this about a year after last seeing it, so I'll just give you the high points (or low points, in a few cases).

Sitting around waiting for the next cargo ship to come in gets boring, so Greek shopkeepers resorted to vandalism. Those are some sort of game boards, carved into what would have been the floor, and businessmen played something on them to pass the time. And if you think that's cool, go look up Senet.

Stuff. That's Doug, delivering his site report, and a gutter which is either remarkably intact or well-restored (or both), and the Tower of the Winds in the background. You can get a good sense for the layout of the place. The bottom-left quarter of this shot shows a level area without anything sticking out of it. This was an open courtyard. Along the right side you can see how, just past the gutter, the land is a few inches higher. This is where the building was, and you would have seen a long, covered are broken up into different stores. The columns supporting that structure are more visible in the background.

A very pretty archway which marked the entrance to the new agora. Walking out that would lead you into the old agora; the Acropolis is due south.

Polluted marble. I'll give you a cookie if you can tell me the order (architectural style) of the columns. DISCLAIMER: You have to come and get it. I'm not mailing you a cookie.

The main flaw of marble is that any bits sticking off from the main column tend to fall off. The Greeks just wrote it off as more suitable for building than sculpting (all of those fancy marbles you see are generally Roman copies of Greek bronzes), but the Romans were determined to make it work. But after a centuries of being kicked around by the elements, barbarians and Christians, bits like heads and hands tend to fall off anyway.

That said, marble is a much more attractive building material than brick.

The door to the Tower of the Winds. It was so named because the top depicts the eight winds. "But wait," you say, "there were only four winds personified in mythology!" Oh ho, what clever and well-read readers I have (or did before I stopped updating regularly and you all got bored and wandered off). There were only four winds, but square buildings are boring, and the lovely 6x13 temple proportions don't lend themselves well to towers, so the ancients just said "Screw it, we'll just make it octagonal and invent four more winds." Only in Greek.

And, to finish up, Doug lecturing about a toilet seat.