The Acropolis of Athens is, without a doubt, one of the most aesthetically impressive and
culturally significant sites in all of world history, but it took me a while to
actually appreciate that. See, my mom is Greek and her family was born in Athens,
so I’ve spent nearly every summer of my life in Greece, visiting my mom’s family in a small town
outside the city. This quiet retreat is the kind of trip that grown-ups dream of, yet, as a child,
it was agonizingly boring, even including our once-yearly trip into Athens-proper to scale the
Acropolis and see the Parthenon in the blazing summer heat. By the time I was 10 years old
I’d made the hike several times already, and this picture so elegantly captures how I was absolutely
sick of it — an aura of raging exhaustion I dutifully recaptured a decade later, to honor
the meme. So far from having a hometown bias on the subject, it took me quite a while to actually
conclude that Athens = Cool. And after years of studying up, I can now explain in detail why this
big ol’ rock is so fascinating. So, to see how the Athenian Acropolis embodies the classical golden
age and then survived, with some difficulty, into the modern day, Let’s do some History.
Though Athens is known for the Acropolis, it wasn’t alone in having an acropolis. The Greek
word means “High City”, and they were a standard feature across the classical world. Even as far
back as the bronze-age Mycenaean period, fortified hilltop citadels served as military bases,
religious sanctuaries, royal palaces, or all of that and more. As Greece is rather mountainous,
there was no shortage of high places to set up shop and get urbanizing. By the dawn of
the Polis Age in the 7th century BC, the limestone plateau of the Athenian acropolis had already been
in use for hundreds of years. It sat a decent ways inland from the Saronic Gulf, but it had two handy
rivers to the north and south and one further out to the west, so the early Athenians had the
benefits of easy water and good farms, along with the safety of a geologically-prefabbed castle.
However, this couldn’t protect them from everything, as in 480, the armies of the
Achaemenid Persian Empire made their second, much more promising attempt to conquer Greece.
A decade earlier, Athens rebuffed the invaders at the Battle of Marathon, but this time around,
Persia made it all the way into Athens itself, burning the city and destroying everything on
the Acropolis. Even though Athens and Sparta did ultimately win the war and kick out Persia
for good, the city of Athens remained devastated for the next three decades,
until the statesman Pericles proposed a new building program in 450 BC. By this point,
Athens had established a panhellenic alliance of Greek states and then completely exploited it for
the benefit of their own glory and wealth, and so far they’d used it to build a giant 30-foot bronze
statue of Athena Promachos, whose spear reflected sunlight for miles around like the beacon of
a lighthouse. And that already was quite a feat; but of course, this being Athens, they needed more
than that. Just to illustrate the scale of the Periclean Building Program, the entire imperial
treasury of Athens and all its tributaries had nearly 10,000 Talents of silver in 450 BC, and
just one of those 60-pound silver bars paid the crew’s wages on a hundred-and-seventy-man warship,
for a month. Now consider that thousands of talents were spent specifically on the Acropolis
over the next 20 years, with two entire temples added in the decades after.
That’s coming up on over half the treasury. To be fair to Athens, it was money well spent.
Even the entryway was a work of art: the Propylaea gatehouse on the western slope of the Acropolis
marked the barrier between the common space of the city below and the sacred space atop the hill.
It was as lavishly decorated as any temple, with dedicated painting galleries in its north
and south wings, and a pathway leading out to the small temple of Athena Nike overlooking
the city from the outer wall. The most imposing feature of the main courtyard was of course the
ginormous Athena statue staring out over the city, but the religious heart of the Acropolis was the
Erechtheion on the north side. Standing on the mythical site of the contest between Athena and
Poseidon, it had a mark in the ground said to come from Poseidon’s trident as well as an olive tree
said to be descended from Athena’s original gift to the city. The asymmetrical shape of the temple
accommodates the uneven terrain on this part of the hill while reflecting the split nature
of worshipping at this site, with one wing for Athena and another for Poseidon. Architecturally,
this building is best known for the Porch of the Maidens, where the six columns are carved
into the shape of women, but the real star was the statue inside: an olivewood idol of Athena Polias,
the physical embodiment of Athena’s divine patronage over the city. As the final stop of
the yearly Panathenaic procession in celebration of the city and their goddess, it’s clear the
Erechtheion was the most religiously-significant building in Athens. But it was not the fanciest.
That, of course, would be the Parthenon. At the time the largest temple in the Greek world, it was
so darn huge that it had to actually account for the optical illusions of straight lines bending
down and outwards. As such, every line on the Parthenon is curved and it has no right angles.
The Doric columns that surround the building are all widest in the middle and lean slightly inward,
while the horizontal lines are all concave. All this subtle weirdness counters the illusions of
buckling and sagging and result in a building that looks perfect. Beyond just planning ahead
to correct an issue that, again, no Greek temple had ever encountered before because none were
this absurdly big, the raw mathematics required to calculate and maintain a consistent curvature
for every surface on this dumbass building are absolute madness. Immaculate proportions aside,
the real focus was up above the colonnade, on the metopes, the friezes, and the pediments.
The square Metopes show scenes of mythological wars, like men fighting centaurs, as a metaphor
for Athens’ victory over Persia. Meanwhile, on the inner wall of the building, a continuous frieze
shows a ceremonial procession. Opinion differs on what this might be, as scholars traditionally held
that this is the great Panathenaic Procession, an obvious choice, but a newer interpretation
is that this is a mythological reference to the procession of King Erechtheus sacrificing
his daughters to win divine favor for a war. This might support the name of the Parthenon,
generally thought to reference Athena Parthenos, the virgin Athena, but could have also described
the maiden daughters of Erechtheus. Which one is it? Who knows. Scholarship is always evolving.
But speaking of Athena, the triangular pediments on top depict the two most important scenes from
Athena’s life, at least as far as Athens was concerned. On the east side Athena springs
forth from the head of Zeus, fully formed and immediately ready for battle. While the west
side shows the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the naming of the city. So,
between the metopes, the pediments, and either interpretation of the frieze,
one could be forgiven for seeing the Parthenon not quite as a temple to Athena but to Athens,
especially considering there was no altar in the temple for sacrifices. Rather, the inside
chambers were unusually divided, with the west end holding the Delian treasury (considerably
thinner after the Parthenon was finished) and the east end devoted solely to a statue of Athena.
Like the Promachos statue outside, this one was huge, but instead of bronze, here Athena’s skin
was made of ivory, while her dress and armor were solid gold. She’s still got her shield and spear,
but now she’s holding the victory goddess Nike. This chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos
likely cost one thousand Talents, making it more expensive that the Parthenon itself. In contrast
to the uber-sacredness of the Erechtheion, the Parthenon acts more like a votive temple,
offered as a gift to Athena in thanks for the glory of Athens. And I dare say it worked.
Yet, contrary to how some people talk about history, Greece did in fact continue to exist
after the classical period, and the Acropolis reflects the progression of that story. A century
after the Athenian imperial heyday, the young Macedonian king Alexander the Persia-Pulverizer
sent the acropolis a gift of Persian shields and armor from his victorious first battle,
and those shields decorated the Parthenon in the early decades of the Hellenistic era before they
were slightly stolen. Two centuries after that, Athens and the rest of mainland Greece were
subjects of the ever-expanding dominion of Rome, and when the new emperor Caesar Augustus came
to power, he added a humble but elegant circular temple to the cult of Roma Et Augustus. However,
being part of the Roman empire meant having Rome’s problems, and in the later centuries that meant
invasions, so in 267 Athens was sacked by the Heruli tribe and much of the Acropolis
was destroyed, including the temple of Roma & Augustus and the statue of Athena Parthenos.
Dangit. Also, the Parthenon’s roof burned down so a new one was built on top of just
the inner Cella, leaving the outer colonnade exposed — it isn’t ideal, but eh, it’s a look.
Later on, after the empire picked up Christianity, Athens became Byzantine
and rededicated the Parthenon to the Virgin Mary,
which is of course a substantial shift, but it still fits the theme of maidenhood, so
credit for consistency. The Parthenon would remain a Christian church for nearly a millennium,
which is about as long as it had been a pagan temple. As befitting a Byzantine Basilica,
the Parthenon became perfect and complete with the addition of a Dome. Well, technically an apse
on the eastern end, so half a dome, but I’ll take it. Accordingly, the interior got mosaics aplenty,
with the church’s namesake Mary shown above the altar, plus scenes of the crucifixion and last
judgement along the walls. What the church of Parthenos Maria lacked in jumbo golden statues
it made up for in a famous manuscript of the gospels, gorgeously gilded and supposedly
transcribed by the hand of Saint Helena, the Christian mother of emperor Constantine. But
as with preceding empires, the Byzantines were not in charge forever, and after Athens
found itself the subject of Latin Crusaders, the Acropolis once again took a new purpose.
Passing from Frenchmen in the 1200s to Catalans and finally to Florentines in the late 1300s,
the Parthenon became a Catholic church with an added belltower, while the Propylaea turned from
the Orthodox Bishop’s residence into a fortified Ducal Palazzo. Cordoned off from the rest of the
now rather sparse city below, the Acropolis had largely lost its democratic purpose and became
a space meant only for rulers. This continued when the city passed into Ottoman hands in the
mid 1400s, as the Turkish military converted the summit into a densely-packed military garrison,
adding a minaret to make the Parthenon a Mosque, and housing the Ottoman governor in
the Propylaea palace. But seeing as this was a military facility, and an ottoman one at that,
they had gunpowder that needed storing. They kept it in the governor’s palace until lightning struck
and blew both the Propylaea and the governor to bits. In the latter half of the 1600s they
moved this storage into the Parthenon. And where Lightning left off, the Venetians soon picked up,
landing a cannon shot directly on the ammo depot and absolutely obliterating the place.
Thank you Vembis, this is somehow only the second-worst thing you have done to Greek culture.
Sigh… And where Venice left off, the British ambassador Lord Elgin was oh-so-thrilled
to pick up, or more accurately tear down, bribing the Ottoman governor to let him haul off most of
the remaining Parthenon Marbles. Bad stretch of time for Athens. But two decades after Elgin,
Greece won its independence and curated a new national identity for itself based primarily on
the ancient past, with Athens as the capital. So the Acropolis was cleared of
Ottoman and medieval remains and restored to its classical, albeit ruined, state.
Although 5-year-old me saw the Acropolis a heap of broken temples that hadn’t been cleaned in
2000 years — rude — this site means so much more than merely buildings which used to be fancy:
it’s the physical embodiment of a precise moment in history and the entire culture it
stood for. Still, there’s far more to the Acropolis, to Athens, and to Greece than
just the Athenian Golden Age, but the rest of the history is ironically buried beneath
that earliest layer. Which is really unfortunate, because when we know what we’re looking for,
the Acropolis is a vivid lens through which we can see the entire history of Athens at a glance,
having been physically transformed in every state of its history: first a Mycenaean citadel,
then a Classical Democracy’s masterpiece, a prized Hellenistic and Roman trophy,
an on-fire Roman trophy, a venerated Byzantine Christian church, a Latin palace and Cathedral, an
Ottoman fortress and Mosque and gunpowder depot, and finally, the physical expression of the Modern
Greek identity. I have been to this mountain of busted-up marble more than twenty times in
my life, but since I’ve actually started learning Greek history, I’ve enjoyed it more and more each
time. The Acropolis is a big dumb pile of rocks, and it’s one of my favorite places on earth.
Thank you for watching! I’ve always wanted to do a video on the whole history of Athens
from front to back, and I think this was my sneaky way of accomplishing
just that. As always, a big thanks to our community of patrons who subsidize
my obsession with Mediterranean history, and I will see you all in the next video.