Ancient Athens Explained

During the classical period of Ancient Greece, every year the Ancient Greeks held a major event in the civic life of Athens, the Panathenaic Procession. It took place along a clearly marked route extending from the Dipylon, the main gate of the city wall, across Athens and up the slopes of the Acropolis to the culminating point, the Erechtheion, where they would bring a peplos tunic and offer it to the statue of the goddess Athena. Every four years the procession would instead culminate inside the Parthenon, offering a larger and much more elaborate tunic, woven to be put on the colossal statue of Athena Parthenos. This route was called the Panathenaic Way and it was used by the citizens of Athens every day of their lives for multiple purposes. Its use must always have raised association with the brilliant and beautiful procession all of them had witnessed since childhood. The entire city of Athens was built around the Panathenaic Way and much of the architectural effort was directed towards providing key points in the experience of this movement, so it served as a sacred way but also as the main street along which occurred the principal mercantile industrial and political activities which made up the life of the city. Athens was surrounded by a 10 meter high wall built with material taken from old ruins. This wall had 13 gates, one of great importance was the Piraeus Gate which led to the harbor town of Piraeus. In 493 BC, when Athens was becoming a major naval power with a fleet of 200 ships, the Piraeus Peninsula was chosen as a new fortified naval base. To overcome the problem of ensuring access between Athens and its harbor in time of war, Pericles built the long walls linking the two in about 456 BC. These walls enclosed a protected corridor about six kilometers in length. All roads connecting Athens to the rest of Greece started at the Dipylon Gate, outside of it was the Keramikos, the ancient cemetery of the city which you can still visit. As you walk the Panathenaic Way, right in the heart of Athens, you stumbled across the center of commerce, government and culture of Greek social life, the Agora, a large open space surrounded by public buildings. The southern and eastern sides were comprised by the Middle Stoa and the Stoa of Attalos, and to the northwest, there were also the Stoa of Zeus and the Stoa Pikile or Painted Stoa. A stoa was a long linear building that was open to the public, and all these spaces were shops where merchants could sell their goods and artists could display their work, and all this colonnade became a place where people could meet and talk and exchange ideas. Some important thinkers of antiquity like Socrates or Plato would philosophize and have debates in the Stoa, and that's where the word Stoicism comes from. This is the Stoa of Attalos, a two-story building with a staircase on each end. The walls were built with limestone and the front facade with pentelic marble. So this building didn't get preserved from antiquity, it was reconstructed in the 20th century, which for archaeologists might not be such a good idea because you damage the real archaeological evidence that's underneath. But for us architects, it's just great because you get to experience the proportions, you get to feel the quality of the space, what kind of light you have available in the interior, and also at an urban level, you get to experience the edge of the building, you get to experience the scale and all these things. So I like it. On the western side of the Agora, there was a small hill on top of which the Temple of Hephaestus rises. This temple from the 5th century BC is considered the best preserved of the ancient Greek temples. It was dedicated to Hephaestus, the god of fire and metallurgy, and to Athena, the patron goddess of the city. The temple provides the most complete example of the perfected Doric hexastyle form. Although smaller in scale, it reflects the sculpture of the Parthenon and much of its architectural style since they were both built at the same time. So just like the Parthenon, this temple has a set of triglyphs and metopes, and a sculpted frieze at the top of the inner walls. It has columns on all sides because it is viewed in the round, and it has 6 columns on its front and back, and 13 on each flank. This imposing Doric temple on top of the spur begins to act as an ordering element to the space of the Agora. At the base of the small hill stood a circular community room called Tholos, the Buleftirion, a place for assemblies, and the Mitron, a temple that housed the official archives of the city. These buildings, together with the Stoa of Zeus, established a vertical axis which counterfoils the horizontal shaft created by the Temple of Hephaestus. A broad flight of steps furnished a fine visual base for the temple, also serving as spectator seats for activities in the Agora. This circle represents the orchestra for the theatrical performances which took place in the area. The condition of the Agora changed through the centuries. As time passed, new stoas were added to enclose the space. Then the Romans conquered Greece, and new buildings were built in the middle of the space of the Agora, something that was not permitted in the periods before the Romans. So the clean, open quality of uncluttered space of the earlier periods is gone, and in its place Confucian has set in. The ungainly mass of the clumsy structure of the Odeon, an indoor meeting hall, throws the sensitive and delicate buildings of the earlier periods out of scale. A second building, the Temple of Aris, was also allowed in the Agora, and the area became increasingly cluttered by statues, fountains, and shrines. So there was a kind of shifting from Greek space, where the building is protagonist of the space, to a Roman space, where the space itself is the protagonist. As an example of this, here you can see the figural Greek space on the Acropolis, and here you can see the enclosed Roman space on the Forum of Pompeii. In the first century BC, within the Pax Romana, a period of Roman history marked by peace and prosperous stability within the Roman borders, and regional expansion, Athens continued to expand. And with funding by Roman emperors like Augustus, a new space known as the Roman Agora was added to the east to house commercial activities, since the ancient Agora's central space had been taken over by large buildings, and there wasn't enough space for commerce. The Roman Agora was a rectangular building with an open courtyard, surrounded by an Ionic portico with shops, storerooms, and offices. Basically a rectangular stoa. It had two propylons acting as entrances, a Doric one made of Pentelic marble on the west, and an Ionic one made of Hymedian marble on the east. There at the eastern end of the Agora, you can see the Tower of the Winds built in the 2nd century BC. It's also known as the Aureolion of Andronikos Kyrros, a Greek architect and astronomer who erected it for measuring time by means of a water clock inside, and a sundial outside, and it also acted as a wind vane. The building rests on a stylobate of three steps, and is octagonal, each of its eight sides facing the more important points of the compass. It is made entirely of Pentelic marble, and the fully preserved roof is formed of 24 equal-sized marble slabs and a circular keystone on which a Corinthian capital rests and served as the base of a bronze wind vane in the form of a trident. The sculpted figures represent the eight principal winds. It's admirable how well this building has preserved, since it's much older than the A century later, the Emperor Hadrian favored Athens, building an extensive new library in 132 AD, north of the Roman Agora. Here you can see that the architecture is much more Roman, with non-structural Corinthian columns and a frontal facade that gives access to an enclosed space. Emperor Hadrian also completed the enormous, long-delayed Temple of Olympian Zeus that had been started in the 6th century BC. This was one of the largest Greek temples in antiquity, occupying an area of 110 meters by 44 meters. It was placed in the center of a magnificent enclosure, and it had 104 Corinthian columns with a height of 17 meters each. Today, only 16 columns survive. Later Roman buildings include the Odeon of Rhodes Atticus, originally a roofed theater for musical performances with seating for 5,000 spectators constructed in 161 AD at the southwestern corner of the Acropolis, completing the cultural precinct that had been built by the Greeks in the previous centuries. This cultural precinct included more stoas at the bottom of the slope and the Theater of Dionysus, one of the largest and oldest theaters of Greek antiquity, and the prototype of all Greek theaters. This venue was where plays by great Athenian dramatists like Euripides and Sophocles were produced, and outside of the city walls, to the southeast of Athens, the Stadium, originally made in the 4th century BC for the Panathenaic Games, the series of spectacles that would take place after the procession. This structure was rebuilt by Rhodes Atticus in 144 AD to provide some 50,000 white marble tourist seats. The Stadium was a foot racecourse, and it came eventually to be used for other athletic performances. It was straight at one end and semicircular at the other, where runners had to turn, and it was 600 Greek feet in length. The sides seem to go in straight line, making it seem a simple construction, but they actually have a subtle arc formed by the very slight curvature of each block. The objective was to give every spectator the best view possible towards the dromos, the track. The seats were acquired for use elsewhere during the Middle Ages, but the Stadium was reconstructed for the modern revival of the Olympic Games in 1896. Many ancient Greek cities were built in the immediate vicinity of a hill which was known as the Acropolis, from Greek ἄκρος, highest point, and πόλις, city, and formed a citadel upon which the principal temples or treasure houses were erected for safety. But what makes the Acropolis of Athens the most monumental, harmonious, and beautiful, is the disposition of its buildings based on human cognition. The determining factor was the human viewpoint. This point was established as the first and most important position from which the whole site could be observed, the main entrance emphasized by a propylon. Radii projected from the vantage point determined the position of three corners of each important building, so that a three-quarter view of each was visible. So, all important buildings could be seen in their entirety from the viewpoint, and if this was not possible, one building could be completely hidden by another. It was never partially concealed. These radii that determined the corners of the important buildings formed certain specific angles from the viewpoint equal in size on each site. Angles of 30 and 36 degrees corresponded to a division of the total field of 360 degrees into 12 parts. The position of the buildings was determined not only by the angle of vision but also by their distance from the viewpoint. These distances were based on simple geometric ratios deriving from the angles of vision. The central angle of the field of vision was left free of buildings and open directly to the surrounding countryside. This represented the direction to be followed by the person approaching the site. It was the sacred. The buildings were often disposed so as to incorporate or accentuate features of the existing landscape and thus create a unified composition. This point was situated at the final step before one entered the sanctuary, at a height of approximately 1.7 meters, the eye level of a man of average height. This system is not just present in the final construction state of the Acropolis, but it is a system that developed throughout centuries as buildings got destroyed and new structures were built. This is the way Greeks developed their urban space, since for them, man is a measure of all things. Besides the Acropolis, there were some important hills within the walls of the city, like the Areopagus, seat of the governing council and from which you can get a panoramic view of the ancient Agora, as well as the western and northern slopes of the Acropolis, and the Pnyx, the hill from where you get the famous view of the Acropolis depicted in numerous paintings. Athenians convened on the Pnyx to conduct their popular assemblies, thus making the hill one of the earliest and most important sites in the creation of democracy. Athens is a city of many layers. There's classical Greek antiquity and there's Roman antiquity, but Greece was also part of the Byzantine Empire and therefore was conquered by the Turks. Hence the Islamic period that it lived for centuries, in which the Parthenon was converted from an Orthodox church into a mosque, until Greece became an independent state from the Ottomans. As you walk through the bustling streets of modern Athens, it's impossible not to feel the echoes of the past. The Parthenon, standing proudly atop the Acropolis, symbolizes not just the architectural prowess of the ancients, but also the enduring legacy of Athens. It has watched empires rise and fall, religions change, and ideologies shift, yet it remains an eternal guardian of history and human achievement. So when you visit Athens, remember that you're not just stepping into a city, you're stepping into a living, breathing museum of human history. You're walking in the footsteps of philosophers, poets, warriors, and visionaries. People who shaped the course of civilization. The Greeks built great cities and great buildings, and the peak of ancient Greek architecture was the Parthenon. And if you want to understand its architecture and the rest of the buildings on top of the Acropolis, then I recommend you watching my video explaining the Acropolis of Athens. Thank you very much for watching. I'd appreciate if you like this video because it helps me and subscribes to my channel. Thank you very much and I'll see you very soon in the next episode. Goodbye.