We started this day at the northwest corner of Athens and the mission was to find out how the city is organized and what constitutes its urban fabric. Previously called Dromos, Athens contains all of the features of any metropolis: streets, blocks, housing, administration, shops, hospitals, etc. Its main northwest street lead to the Academy of Plato, located in the suburbs. Also in this corner of the city we found the Demosion Sema, which was public cemetery where Athenians would bury loved ones and is thought to be the located of Pericles and the commemoration spot of soldiers who died in the Peloponnesian War. One reason it’s located here was that a typical practice of Greek city-states was to bury their dead outside the city walls. Burials would also often take place along the Sacred Way, which was an extremely important ritual procession route. Excavations here found both elaborately and humbly decorated tombs that contained both cremation and inhumation, signifying, as in Rome, multiple cultures coming together and blending. It’s interesting to consider this fact and the seeming contradiction it represents. The Greeks had deeply ingrained in their society a concept of the citizen: one who would participate in political life, could vote in elections, and in groups could make a true impact in the daily lives of all people. Yet, at the end of their lives, they were to be buried outside the city walls. Doesn’t this seem like an incongruity? The populous would spend their whole lives building up reputations, relationships, and connections, yet at the end were given a resting place out beyond the limits of their home. In order to respectfully remember citizens of Athens, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to keep them within the confines of the city, instead of burying them “out there” in the wild, beyond the walls? These questions are not for me to rule on, since they were answered thousands of years before my birth. Nevertheless I feel they are an important set of questions to ask.
The next element of the urban fabric we studied was the Ancient Agora, the open space adjacent to the Acropolis which was the cradle of Athenian Democracy. It consolidated a wide variety of practices of everyday life including those political, administrative, public, religious, military, commercial, judicial, and leisure. The Agora was the heart of political life in the city, a place for discussion and debate and to experiment with Democracy. High above the Agora is the Areos Pagos, which was the ancient judicial court and dedicated later to Mars by the Romans. The area underwent many transformations throughout the years, but the underlying fabric tended not to change, as was the case with the Panathenaic Way, which was a diagonal street cut through the Agora. It is an anti-Roman construct in the fact that it is non-orthogonal and served many religious and processional purposes for the ancient Athenians. It was Kleisthenes who devised a system of representation for everyone instead of just a few; political units were constituted from the 10 tribes around Athens and the overall purpose was to usurp power from the aristocratic families and give it back to the people. It’s quite a fascinating concept considering the innumerable monarchies and supreme rulers that were ubiquitous in the ancient world. It’s also a reason why we study ancient Greece instead of ancient Persia: their idea to bring power to the masses is generally well received because it’s popular. There has always been that inkling within everyone to be free, and although we may still not have fully manifested this concept in the United States, the thread has seemingly followed us since antiquity. Similarly to the Congress in the US, Athens featured a boule; a house of the Parliament which needed votes from the citizens to pass laws, for their only duty was to prepare topics for the people to consider. Executive power in this system would rotate between the different tribes. Additional structures in the Agora, and most likely ones which will be repeated in the cities we will see, included the stoas, which housed commercial functions; various altars to serve their polytheistic lifestyle; theaters; a metroon, or public archives (a possible precursor to the library); and the bouleterion, or council building.
To visit the next structure was also quite a treat. The temple of Hephaistos is by far the most well-preserved Doric temple from antiquity. To see a temple this old and in this good of a condition is so extremely rare. Anything could seemingly happen to these ancient structures: fire, war, natural disaster, etc. that could ruin them. It wasn’t the positioning of this temple, which was dedicated also to Athena and built around 430 BCE, that kept it from ruin. The reason it could have survived was that some of these ancient structures were converted to churches after Christianity swept through the Mediterranean world. And despite the innumerable amount of conflicts that permeated the areathis hexastyle, peristyle temple survives today without a single column missing. It is the prototypical Doric temple featuring three separate cellas, the opisthonais, naos, and pronaos. The peristyle nature of the typical temple means that the inner rooms could be set free from the confines of the exterior rows of columns, almost making the structure seem transparent in a way.
Used primarily for commercial purposes but could essentially be repurposed for any usage, the stoa was a major building type during the Classical Greek period in Athens. A recreation of one of these stoas, the Stoa of Attalos, figures prominently in any study of the fabric of the Agora. Usually, the stoa would define the outline of this open space, doing its part to enclose the area while still allowing a sense of place to be felt by its inhabitants. Featuring a Doric colonnade that fronts the Agora, the stoa utilized the concepts of passive cooling inside to create air flows in the centuries before air conditioning. I think the most important question to ask about this space is: is it inside or outside? One could theoretically debate both sides – you are technically outside because you aren’t enclosed by 4 walls. Yet at the same time you have a roof over your head which protects you from the elements and provides a basic measure of shelter – 2 basic requirements for architecture. In a sense, then it is simultaneously both; each argument has equal weight. It also has a different functionality than that of the temple, for it’s not regarded for its sculptural qualities but rather for the modular repetition of spaces and its multi-functionality. The rhythm created by the columns along its long rectangular shape is an example perhaps of early Mannerism: taking what you would normally expect (maximum 12-14 columns in a temple) and stretching it out horizontally along the ground.
The first example of a stadium was the Panathenaic Stadium, in the Southeast corner of the city outside the city walls. The Greeks were quite a competitive bunch. They hosted athletic games in honor of the deities and is a unique feature of this civilization that isn’t found anywhere else in the ancient world at this time. Amazingly, it was made entirely of marble and the seating takes advantage of the sloping site.
We were also introduced to the number of public works projects around the city that were made under the direction of the Roman Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD. After a large temple dedicated to Zeus called the Olympeion was not completed because it was so large and would have cost the city so much money, Hadrian, with a large amount of respect for Greek culture, came to Athens and finished it. This was part of a pattern on the part of the great Emperor to leave many of the structures of ancient Greece alone and simply add to, renovate, or reconstruct buildings without disturbing what was there. Even after its completion, it was still subject to the same forces that all other structures were exposed to, and inevitably fell. As the Romantic period in the 18th and 19th centuries took hold across Europe, John Ruskin advocated leaving the fallen structures as they were. He was nearly obsessed with romanticizing the past and for not reconstructing it, for reasons which I still do not fully understand.
The Greeks were so eternally grateful to Hadrian for reconstructing this temple that they built a gate in his honor, which acts as a threshold to the city and features both Greek and Roman architectural themes. It’s hard to classify this structure in any certain category because of the mixing of orders and mixing of CULTURES within the same edifice. One could certainly say though that it represents the coming together of civilizations, not necessarily the mixing of them because the orders and elements are completely separate on each level. The way the gate is intended to be read is the side you’re standing on should be represented on the face you’re looking at. For instance, standing facing the Acropolis it would say Hadrian, as if it would be a reminder as to where you were in the world, not a sign that you were entering someone else’s. It’s an interesting concept, but hard to describe without actually walking around the entire structure and reading what it says on both sides.
The next location was the rest of the unexplored territory around the Agora. There are a variety of structures around this area which contribute significantly to the fabric of Athens, and looking back on the day’s walk we’re dealing with quite a sophisticated society. We were introduced to the Peripatos, which was the walk that goes around the Acropolis hill. All of the citizens would tend to participate in this walk, and it was intended to be an educational one, mixing learning with experiencing nature at the same time. Along the way we came across the Stoa of Eumenes, the Athenian Aesclepion, and the Odeon of Herod Atticos. Each of these structures performed a different civic function, from commercial and retail usage, to healing the sick, to hosting dramatic music performances, and none of which is without merit for such a large urban population.
We also visited one of the earliest theaters to be constructed, the Theater of Dionysius. Originally, the performances of plays were held in the Agora until there was such a demand for this type of entertainment that a dedicated structure had to be built for it. As part of the learning walk of the Peripatos, the Greek tragedies held in the theaters would give people time to reflect on their lives, the good/bad parts of one’s soul and what it means to be a moral citizen. I find it to be of great value sometimes to just sit and think about my place in the world. While our society seems to be speeding up with the advent of facebook and smartphones, we often don’t give our minds the space to expand on what our place is today in the modern world. The Greeks didn’t have as many things to distract them from everyday life, either, so it would have been a portion of their day that they could use to ‘culture’ themselves and hold up a mirror to society.
One of the other interesting areas we visited was the Pnyx, also sometimes referred to as the Hill of the Nymphs. It had somewhat of an amphitheater-like quality, and that was probably a good thing considering its function was to practice their form of Democracy. It was in good working order until voting, which would require a quorum of 6000 citizens to pass a law, was moved to the Theater of Dionysius to accommodate more citizens.
One can’t appreciate the Democratic processes that went on at the Pnyx and the rather free-flowing manner in which they took place unless you consider the Areos Pagos, which was previously the supreme court of Athens. Perched atop a dramatic rocky outcrop further down from the Acropolis sits this natural formation which would be a place where life/death crimes were to be heard in front of the magistrates. I got the impression that this place was to be an extremely intimidating and daunting place to have your life decided on, as the steep drop from all sides of it only added to the heightened sense of drama.
Finally, we ended this day taking a look at Hadrian’s Library, which became a popular building type after the Library of Alexander was built in the 4th century BCE; every city started to build one. It was Pergamin who developed a writing technique that could be used on papyrus, but the process of copying a book was still at this time a colossal undertaking. I can’t imagine what the literacy rate must have been for the people of ancient Greece. Yes, they practiced Democracy and held open debates, but what about the rest of the population which did not participate in political life and were perhaps less economically well off than the upper class? Were they left to educate themselves? Searching for a copy of a book must have been nearly impossible until the advent of the library. This building type sought to consolidate all the accumulated knowledge of a society into one democratic process whereby citizens could enlighten themselves if they chose to do so. Hadrian’s library is also conveniently located near the center of the city, further emphasizing the desire to have all citizens participate in the proliferation of useful knowledge. I come back to this idea that I wrote about in my Rome journal that accurate knowledge and the protection thereof is very fragile. What everyone is constantly searching for is the truth: truth in people, in politics, in science, in life. If we don’t protect these attempts that mankind has made of searching for the truth, all we’re left with is speculation, bad science, and a propaganda-filled society. Therefore, it is significantly incumbent on the educated class to preserve libraries (and digital media) to the best and most precise of our abilities; otherwise we lose a bit of our humanity and cease to be conscious, fact-seeking creatures.
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