Strange Stones on the Acropolis, Explained [7:00]

Transcript

If you’ve ever stood in the streets of Athens, Greece, and looked up at the Acropolis, you might have noticed something strange. There’s a row of enormous marble cylinders embedded in the north face of the wall. And close by, there are stone pieces that look like they belong on a temple, but they’re not on a temple. It’s just a fortification wall. Millions of people photograph this wall every year, and almost none of them notice. The ones who do usually assume it’s sloppy repair work from some recent century. But those stones were placed during the classical period, which was the height of Athenian craftsmanship, and they might be the world’s oldest war memorial.

To understand how they got there, let’s go to the year 490 BC. The Persians have the largest empire the world has ever seen. They invade Greece, and against all odds, the Athenians defeat them at the Battle of Marathon. To celebrate, the Athenians start building a massive new temple to Athena on top of the Acropolis. It was bigger than anything they’d ever attempted. Archaeologists today call it the old Parthonon because it never got finished because the Persians came back this time under King Xerxes and this time the Athenians couldn’t stop them.

So they asked the oracle at Delelfi what to do. The oracle told them that a wood-built wall will by Zeus all-seeing be granted to the tritoborn a stronghold for you and your children. They interpreted this as meaning their naval fleet. So they evacuated the entire city and took to the seas. Our main source for this is Herodotus. He says that when the Persians arrived at the Acropolis, they found a small group that had stayed behind and barricaded the gates with timber. Convinced that this is what the oracle actually meant would save them. And for a while, they held out.

The Persians occupied the Aropagus, the low hill facing the entrance of the Acropolis, and shot burning arrows to set their barricade on fire. But the defenders refused to surrender. Herodotus says eventually Persian climbers managed to scale the Acropolis at an unguarded point. And when the defenders saw them inside, some threw themselves off the walls to their deaths. Others fled into the main temple as supplicants. The gates were opened from the inside. And after the Persians killed the supplicants, they plundered the sanctuary and set fire to the whole of the Acropolis. This meant the temples, the statues, the offerings, and the old Parthonon, which was still under construction.

That wasn’t the end of it. Ten months after the first sack, the Persian General Mardanius reoccupied Athens. Herodotus says he wanted to send a fire signal to Xerxes, who was now at Sardis, using a chain of beacons across the islands. Before he left, he burnt Athens and utterly overthrew and demolished whatever wall or house or temple was left standing. Eventually, the Greeks expelled the Persians and the Athenians returned to their ruined city. Their first priority was the walls. They began rebuilding them at record speed. Thucydides’ writing later in that century says the whole population was at work, men, women, and children. They added in the ruins of all kinds of buildings and even grave monuments and sculpture pieces.

Up on the Acropolis, when they raised the new curtain wall along the northern edge, they filled that too with the wreckage of their temples, including the old Parthonon. On one level, it’s just practical. Broken buildings make good rubble. But some scholars have looked more closely at how they incorporated these temple pieces and come up with another theory. The Athenians didn’t grind up the pieces or reshape them at all. They took 29 column drums from the unfinished temple, each one weighing several tons, hauled them across the Acropolis, and set them into the outer face of this wall, perfectly stacked in a neat row. And nearby, they arranged the architrave, triglyphs, and metopes. And it’s all clearly visible from below.

The north side of the Acropolis was the side that faced the Agora, the civic heart of Athens. So every Athenian looking up from the square would see the pieces of their ruined temple staring back down at them. There’s an ancient story of why this was done. The order Lurgos and later historian Diodorus claimed the Greek allies swore an oath before their final battle with the Persians at Plataea. One part of it was I will not rebuild any of the temples that are burnt or ruined, but I will leave them as a monument to posterity of the impiety of the barbarians. Is the oath genuine? Historians have argued about that for centuries. In fact, even in antiquity, the historian Theopompus called it an Athenian fabrication. But it certainly would explain the precise arrangement of these pieces in the wall if they were intended as a memorial.

There’s a second theory that gives the temple pieces a different type of significance. The idea is that the drums don’t just commemorate an oath. They mark the exact spot where the climbers got in. Herodotus wrote that in front of the Acropolis and behind the gates and the ascent was a place where no one was on guard since no one thought any man could go up that way. Here some men climbed up near the sacred precinct of Krops’ daughter Aglaros. Although the place was a sheer cliff, Aglaros was a mythological figure who had thrown herself from the Acropolis to save Athens. So if you knew where her sanctuary was, you’d know where the Persians climbed over, according to Herodotus.

For most of modern history, scholars believed the sanctuary was on the north slope where the temple pieces are. In other words, that the temple pieces had been placed right where the Persians got over. But in 1980, an excavation changed all that. Workers cutting a trench for the footpath around the Acropolis found a fallen marble stele below the big cave on the east side, the steep side almost nobody visits. It carries a decree from the 3rd century BC honoring a woman named Timoke, a priestess of Aglaros, and it was ordered to be set up in her sanctuary. The archaeologist who published the initial research, Yorgos Andros, titled his article The True Aglarion. He said the stone indicates that the sanctuary was on the east, not the north under the memorial. And if the sanctuary is on the east side and Herodotus is right that the Persians climbed up by the sanctuary, it means the Persians climbed up on the east.

There are a few weaknesses to the argument. Scholars aren’t sure the stone was found in place. It was attached to its base, but it had fallen over, and stones can move. But more importantly, the cave doesn’t really match Herodotus’ description. He says the climb happened in front of the Acropolis, which is a strange way to describe the east cliff. Dantis argued it seems the most plausible explanation is that the ancients regarded as the official front of the Acropolis, not the side where the entrance was situated, but that of the front part of their temples, i.e., their eastern part. Scholars have argued about this for the past several decades back and forth. Today, Dantis’ identification of the sanctuary of Aglaros with this east slope cave has become the standard view. But not everyone thinks that the Persians climbed up there or climbed up at all.

There’s another debate now about whether Herodotus’ story of the Persian climbers taking the Acropolis belongs to military history or mere folklore. So the temple pieces themselves and their significance are still an unsolved mystery. We aren’t sure what went into the decision to place them in the wall. What’s indisputable is that the Athenians picked out pieces everyone would recognize. The columns, the temple front, and built them into the wall facing the city where no one could avoid seeing them even today. Other empires have fought their way through this region. Even the new Parthonon has been blown up. That’s a story for another time. But those drums are still exactly where the Athenians placed them. So next time you’re in Athens, look up.

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