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The Oracle of Delphi—Was She Really Stoned?

BAS Staff — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:00:42 +0000

Read “Was She Really Stoned?” by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale as it originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 2002. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in 2013.—Ed.

The world’s most famous (and powerful) oracle resided at Delphi, high up the slopes of Mount Parnassus in the Temple of Apollo. In ancient times, supplicants would wind up the mountainside, patiently hoping for words of wisdom from the priestess (called the Pythia) in the temple’s adyton (inner chamber). Corbis

Archaeologists are good at recovering things left behind by the past, such as buildings, incense altars, tools and relief carvings. What they are not so good at recovering are the ideas, feelings and emotions—the innerness—of sentient ancient beings. It’s one thing to examine a temple’s holy of holies; it’s another thing to understand what went on there and what people experienced. Sometimes, however, there’s an exception to the rule.

Numerous classical authors report that natural phenomena played an essential part in one of their most sacred religious rituals: the oracle at Delphi. According to the geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.), for example, “the seat of the oracle is a cavern hollowed down in the depths … from which arises pneuma [breath, vapor, gas] that inspires a divine state of possession” (Geography 9.3.5). Over the past five years, a team of researchers—a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist—has put that claim to the test, making it much more likely that we will actually understand what happened at Delphi.

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When ancient Greeks and Romans had to make decisions, they consulted the gods—by drawing lots, casting dice, interpreting dreams and analyzing such signs as sneezes, thunderbolts and flying birds. But for matters of the utmost importance, they sought to hear the words of the gods in the mouths of oracles.^a

Pythias were virgins who dedicated their lives to prophesying on behalf of the god Apollo. The first Pythia is said to have been the goddess Themis, who is depicted on a fifth-century B.C. cup (shown here) sitting on a tripod and holding a bowl and a sprig of laurel (Apollo’s sacred tree). According to Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.) and other sources, the Pythia was inspired by mysterious vapors, though these accounts have been largely ignored by modern researchers. Now, however, a team of archaeologists and geologists have proved that the Temple of Apollo sat directly above fault lines that likely released intoxicating carbon-based gases into the adyton. Was this the oracle’s secret?

Paradoxically, in male-dominated classical Greece the most influential voice, the Delphic oracle, belonged to a woman. The oracular temple was perched on the south slope of Mount Parnassus, surrounded by high cliffs, about 75 miles west of Athens. Getting to Delphi required either a long trek across the mountains or a sea voyage to the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth. However difficult the journey, thousands of visitors sought guidance from the holy woman, called the Pythia,^b who spoke on behalf of the gods.

The Pythia dealt less in visions of the future than in right choices: where to locate a new colony, when to attack an enemy, how to lift a curse, whom to choose as leader, what offering to make to which god. No kingdom, city or private person could afford to make critical decisions without consulting the Pythia. Thanks to her prestige, Delphi became the richest and most famous Hellenic sanctuary. The Greeks called it the omphalos, or “navel of the world.”

How could a mere mortal command such respect? The answer lies in the belief that Apollo—the god of revelation and inspiration—used the Pythia as his mouthpiece, taking possession of her during oracular sessions. The Pythia would fall into a trance, and the words she spoke were supposedly those of Apollo, delivered in a voice very unlike her normal tones.

Most scholars believe the Delphic oracle was established around the eighth century B.C., when founders of new colonies would consult the Pythia before setting out for the western Mediterranean, North Africa, Asia Minor or the Black Sea. The origins of the oracle are recounted in a story about a goatherd named Koretas, who pastured his flock on the slope of Mount Parnassus. Koretas noticed that when the goats grazed near a certain fissure in the mountainside, they began to bleat strangely. Approaching the fissure, he was filled with a prophetic spirit. Eventually, a woman—the first Pythia—was appointed to sit on a tripod over the cleft and give prophecies. Before she could mount the tripod, however, a goat had to be sacrificed to ensure that the day was propitious.

Image: Frank Ippolito.

During the classical period, supplicants would line up at dawn to walk along the Sacred Way, a steep path snaking up through the sanctuary toward the Temple of Apollo. The priests and temple attendants determined the order of the queue, giving priority to state embassies and then working their way down through military commanders, athletes, poets and, last of all, mere heads of families concerned about a child or an investment. The supplicants filed past bronze statues, war monuments and treasure houses dedicated in the past by grateful visitors. It would have been late in the day by the time the ordinary men at the rear reached the terrace of the temple and viewed the famous inscriptions, “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.”

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From here the way led up a ramp to a great colonnade of Doric columns, and then through a double door into the temple itself. Inside burned a constant pinewood fire tended by women of Delphi. The final approach to the oracle led downward into a sunken space below the level of the temple floor, where the visitor would be confronted by a gold statue of Apollo and the omphalos stone that marked the sacred spot. The Pythia sat in a recessed inner sanctum called the adyton, a Greek word meaning “not to be entered.” Standing outside the adyton, visitors would ask their questions and await the response.

Unlike itinerant prophets and omen-interpreters, the Pythia derived her power from the place—she could only prophesy while seated in the adyton within the Temple of Apollo. According to Strabo, the pneuma arose from a small opening (chasma ges) in the adyton: “Over the mouth [of the opening] a high tripod is set. Mounting this, the Pythia inhales the pneuma and then speaks prophecies in verse or in prose. The latter are versified by poets on duty in the temple” (Geography 9.3.5.).

Strabo was not the only ancient source to describe the adyton and the intoxicating gas. The second-century A.D. traveler Pausanias told of a spring in the temple’s adyton that made the Pythia prophetic. Also, in On the Obsolescence of the Oracles, the biographer Plutarch (c. 46–120 A.D.), who served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, described an exhalation of vapor in the adyton that sent the Pythia into a trance.
Despite these testimonies, no serious scholar over the last 50 years has accepted the idea that the Pythia’s trance was caused by a gaseous emission.

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Modern investigations began in the 1890s, when French archaeologists began to excavate the sanctuary at Delphi. They first moved the modern village of Kastri, household by household, from above the ancient sanctuary to the town of Delphi, west of the sanctuary. The French archaeologists uncovered the boundary wall of the ancient sanctuary, an entry gate, and the lower stretches of the Sacred Way. By 1893 they had reached the terrace of the Temple of Apollo—where they found that scarcely a stone remained in place above the floor. The columns had toppled, and the statuary had been carried off or destroyed. In the lower chamber, where the oracle once spoke, no trace of the ancient structure remained. Even the archaeologists’ attempts to reach bedrock were frustrated as water filled the excavated areas.

While the French team was excavating the temple, a young English scholar named A.P. Oppé published a report based on his visit to the site. Oppé proposed that the ancient sources had confused the fissure with a nearby gorge, and that the vapor was simply a fiction that had been passed down from source to source.¹

In 1927, after a hiatus precipitated by World War I, a scholar named M.F. Courby published the French team’s final report of the temple excavations. He described the bedrock under the center of the temple as “fissured by the action of the waters”—suggesting that the ancient traditions of an opening in the rock may have been correct.² By then, however, Oppé’s theory that the ancients simply misconstrued the facts had taken too strong a hold among scholars for the issue to be reconsidered. The final blow came in 1950: Pierre Amandry of the École Française d’Athènes stated definitively—or so it was widely believed—that exhalations of intoxicating gas could never have existed at Delphi. Only volcanic activity could produce such gas, Amandry (incorrectly) noted, and Delphi does not lie in a volcanic area.³ For almost half a century, debates about the geological origins of the oracle virtually ceased.^c

The first step toward a modern reassessment of the evidence was made in the 1980s by geologist (and co-author) Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, the senior member of our project in Delphi. De Boer was conducting surveys, under the auspices of the United Nations and the Greek government, to identify active fault lines. One area he studied was the south slope of Mount Parnassus, where he noted an exposed fault both east and west of the sanctuary of Apollo—though it could not be seen at the site of the temple, where it was covered by ancient construction and debris from rock slides. De Boer suspected that the fault did indeed run under the temple, but he gave the matter no more thought.

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It was not until the summer of 1995 that Zeilinga de Boer encountered an archaeologist, co-author John Hale of the University of Louisville, who assured him, first, that he could not possibly have seen any such feature at Delphi and, second (after Zeilinga de Boer described the fault in detail), that this might be a discovery of major importance. We decided to continue investigations at Delphi, eventually adding a chemist (Jeff Chanton of Florida State University and the U.S. Geological Survey Magnetic Laboratory) and a toxicologist (Henry Spiller of the Kentucky Poison Center) to the team.

In 1996, with the support of Rozina Kolonia, the director of the Delphi Museum, we conducted a survey of the site and found that the sections of exposed fault on either side of the sanctuary were indeed part of the same fault—an active fault extending about 13 miles east-west along the southern flank of Mount Parnassus. We named this fault the Delphi Fault.

This egg-shaped stone—the very stone described by the Greek writer Pausanias, who visited Delphi in the second century A.D.—represents the omphalos, or “navel of the world.” According to Greek legend, Delphi was fixed as the center of the world when Zeus released two eagles, one from the west and the other from the east, which met in the sky above Delphi. The original omphalos stone, now lost, was probably an archaic cult object that supplicants draped with wreaths, resembling the wreaths carved in relief on this stone. Erich Lessing

In subsequent seasons we identified a second fault, extending approximately southeast-northwest. This fault could be traced along a line of springs running through the center of the sanctuary. The highest spring, above the temple, is called the Kerna Spring; its water is currently channeled westward to modern Delphi. Further down the slope, though still above the temple, a mass of travertine (a kind of limestone) deposited by calcite-rich waters indicates another spring. There is also an elaborate channel for a spring built into the southern foundation wall of the temple itself. Although this spring is dry today, the early 20th-century French archaeologists found it difficult to reach bedrock within the sanctuary because their holes kept filling up with water. Down the slope below the temple, yet another spring emerges from a cleft in the bedrock near the Treasury of the Athenians.
We have named this southeast-northwest fault the Kerna Fault, after its highest spring. In de Boer’s opinion, the Kerna Fault intersects the Delphi Fault at or near the site of the temple.

What the ancient authors described as a fissure (chasma ges) in the rock over which the Pythia sat was probably a small fracture extending up from the intersection of these two faults. Very likely, this is also what M.F. Courby, in his 1927 publication of the French team’s excavations, was describing when he wrote that the bedrock was “fissured by the action of the waters.”

Greek geologists had already identified the limestone under the temple as bituminous (oil-bearing), with a petrochemical content as high as 20 percent. These petrochemicals appeared to be a possible source of gases. But how exactly could they be released from the rock into the atmosphere?

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The Delphi Fault is linked to one of Greece’s most geologically active features: the great rift, or graben, that today is filled by the waters of the Gulf of Corinth. This is a recent feature, geologically speaking, having formed roughly two million years ago. The rift continues to widen; as it does, motion occurs along faults and earthquakes are triggered. In 373 B.C., for example, earthquakes almost completely destroyed the Delphic temple on the north side of the gulf, as well as coastal towns on the south side.

As slippage occurs along the fault lines, adjacent rock masses are heated, vaporizing the lighter petrochemicals in the limestone and expelling gases upward along the face of the faults. Once faulting has opened such a pathway, gases continue to rise, although the volume would slowly decrease over time. We believe that this is exactly what happened at Delphi: The rock masses deep in the earth were heated, and they intermittently produced gases that rose up along the intersection of the two fault lines, eventually entering the adyton of the temple through one or more fissures over which the Pythia sat.

Read about the discovery in ancient Hierapolis of Pluto’s Gate, a site shrouded in misty poisonous vapors and considered sacred to the underworld deity Pluto.

Exhalations of gases from bituminous limestone have been observed by geologists studying underwater faults in the Gulf of Mexico. There light hydrocarbon gases—methane, ethane and ethylene, all of them intoxicants—have been found bubbling up from the rock below. Closer to Delphi, similar exhalations were detected near the Isthmus of Corinth, as well as on the island of Zakynthos.

We decided to test the spring water at Delphi, along with samples of the travertine rock that the ancient springs had deposited on the retaining walls and slopes around the temple. If significant quantities of gases had been emitted with the spring water, traces of these gases might be found in the travertine deposits. The very presence of travertine rock, formed from dissolved calcites in warm spring water, is evidence that the springs along the Kerna Fault had their origin at deep levels.

The water and travertine from the sanctuary of Apollo, which were analyzed by Jeff Chanton, revealed traces of the light hydrocarbon gases found in the Isthmus of Corinth and on Zakynthos. Could this explain the Pythia’s state of intoxication in ancient times?

Apollo sits on a carved ompholos stone—perhaps even a representation of the stone shown in the previous photo—on a coin (shown here) minted in Antioch in 225–223 B.C. Clearly, the Delphic oracle and its association with Apollo were well known throughout the ancient world in Hellenistic times. By the first century A.D., however, the Pythia’s powers were failing, perhaps because the volume of gases flowing into the adyton had decreased—and by the fourth century, the demise of the oracle was complete. Photo: American Numismatic Society.

The ancient sources describe two distinct types of prophetic trance experienced by the Pythia. First, and more normally, she would lapse into benign semi-consciousness, during which she remained seated on the tripod, responding to questions—though in a strangely altered voice. According to Plutarch, once the Pythia recovered from this trance, she was in a composed and relaxed state, like a runner after a race. A second kind of trance involved a frenzied delirium characterized by wild movements of the limbs, harsh groaning and inarticulate cries. When the Pythia experienced this delirium, Plutarch reports, she died after only a few days—and a new Pythia took her place.

According to toxicologist Henry Spiller, both of these symptoms are associated with the inhalation of hydrocarbon gases. Spiller studies the effects of such inhalants on young people, known as “huffers,” who breathe in fumes from gas, glue, paint thinner and other substances because of their intoxicating properties. Perhaps the Pythia too was high on one of these hydrocarbon gases.

It may even be possible to identify the kind of gas. Plutarch—who, we recall, was a priest of Apollo at the Delphic sanctuary—noted that the intoxicating pneuma had a sweet smell, like expensive perfume. Of the hydrocarbon gases, only ethylene has a sweet smell—so ethylene was probably a component in the gaseous emission inhaled by the Pythia.

Now, there is a good deal of evidence concerning ethylene intoxication, particularly from the early 20th century. In laboratory tests involving human subjects, the pioneering anesthesiologist Isabella Herb and other scientists studied the effects of light doses of ethylene. Ethylene worked twice as fast as nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and achieved similar effects with only half the quantity. In high concentrations, ethylene produced complete unconsciousness; in low concentrations, it induced a trance state. Ultimately, ethylene’s use as a medical anesthetic was discontinued because of its combustibility: A spark from electrical equipment in the operating room could ignite the ethylene canister, causing it to explode.⁴

From the evidence of “huffers” and the experiments with ethylene, we know that subjects normally react to inhaling small quantities of these gases by entering a benign “out-of-body” trance. They can remain seated and answer questions, but their tone of voice and typical speech patterns are altered. Recovery takes place as soon as the subject is removed from exposure to the gas, and complete amnesia about the trance follows. In a minority of cases (about one in six) in the ethylene experiments, subjects experienced delirium, or a “bad trip.” Experimenters had to use restraints to hold down those undergoing this delirium, which was accompanied by groaning, shrieking and a thrashing of the arms and legs.

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Unfortunately, no detailed accounts of the Pythia’s behavior survive from the golden age (seventh to fifth century B.C.) of the Delphic oracle. By the time Plutarch took office as priest of Apollo at Delphi, the oracle’s powers had significantly diminished. According to Plutarch, emissions of pneuma in the adyton were slight and unpredictable, leading to the decline of the oracle itself. He suggested that whatever produced the pneuma in the rock below the temple had become exhausted, or that the fissures in the rock had been blocked up in the 373 B.C. earthquake. The Delphic oracle never recovered its former prestige after this earthquake, even though the temple was rebuilt.

The diminished flow of gas may not have been the only reason for the decline of the institution. Plutarch opined that the pneuma was merely a trigger for the prophetic trance, and that the Pythia’s lifelong training and psychological preparation played the most important role in her spiritual possession. In a memorable simile, Plutarch compared Apollo to a musician, the Pythia to a lyre, and the pneuma to the musician’s uncanny ability to produce music by touching the instrument. Perhaps there were socio-cultural reasons for the decline of the institution, or perhaps, as the gaseous emissions became less powerful, devoting one’s life to the oracle became less attractive.

Whatever the reasons for the oracle’s demise, we can no longer dismiss ancient traditions concerning its origins and power. Strabo, Plutarch and the others have been rescued by science from a century of calumny.

Read the Bible History Daily feature Medicine in the Ancient World.

The House of Apollo: A History

The Delphic oracle appears often in Greek myth, even in the account of the repopulating of the earth after a great flood. The high god Zeus, distressed over mankind’s wickedness, sends a flood to cover the earth, but two pious human beings, Deucalion (Prometheus’s son) and Pyrrha (Prometheus’s niece), survive by climbing Mount Parnassus. With the ebbing of the flood, the two descend the mountain and come upon the Delphic temple site, where they hear a voice: “Veil your heads and cast behind you the bones of your mother!” Like many of the Delphic oracles, this one is initially enigmatic, but Deucalion and Pyrrha soon realize that the earth is their mother; so they throw rocks over their shoulders, and the rocks are transformed into men and women, saving humanity from perdition.

Photo: Erich Lessing.

Another famous, or infamous, visit to the oracle was made by the young Oedipus—who, having been adopted as a baby, wanted to know the identity of his parents. (The third-century A.D. marble relief above shows Oedipus [center] sacrificing to the Delphic oracle in front of a statue of Apollo [left].) However, the Delphic oracle informed the young man that he would murder his father and commit incest with his mother. To foil the prophecy, Oedipus left Corinth, which he (erroneously) believed to be his native land. On his journey he killed another chariot-driver in a fit of ancient road rage—but unknown to him, the other driver was his father Laius, King of Thebes.

The oracle at Delphi was also consulted by non-mythical figures. In the sixth century B.C., King Croesus of Lydia, in western Anatolia, inquired whether he should attack King Cyrus of Persia. “If you attack,” replied the Pythia, “you will destroy a great kingdom.” Croesus attacked the Persians, suffered total defeat, and saw his kingdom absorbed into the Persian Empire. Croesus had destroyed a great kingdom—his own.

Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

More than a century later, the philosopher Socrates—shown above in a Hellenistic bust—reminded the Athenians at his trial in 399 B.C. that the oracle had declared him the wisest of men, a fact that did not save him from execution.

Photo: David Harris/Collection Israel Museum

After Greece was conquered by Rome, a number of Roman emperors posed questions to the oracle. Nero (54–68 A.D.) was warned to beware the 73rd year, and he was later assassinated by troops who made the 73-year-old Galba emperor in his place. Hadrian (117–138 A.D.), shown in the bronze statue above, ever the intellectual, wanted to know the birthplace of the poet Homer. (The Pythia’s answer: Homer was the grandson of Odysseus and born at Ithaca.) The oracle advised Diocletian (284–305 A.D.) to persecute Christians—which Christians avenged by destroying a number of oracle sites in the fourth century A.D. Finally, the envoys of the pagan Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363 A.D.) received word of the oracle’s demise from the Pythia: “Tell the king the fair-built hall has fallen; Apollo now has no house or oracular laurel or prophetic spring; the water is silent.”

Notes

a. The oracle at Delphi was not the only ancient oracle, though it was the most powerful. Other Greek oracles were located at Epidaurus and in Asia Minor at Colophon and Didyma. Italy’s most famous oracle was at Cumae (near Naples), where a sibyl, or priestess, prophesied in a cavern; originally, the sibyl’s utterances were inscribed on palm leaves.

b. “Pythia” derives from the original name of the site, Pytho. Homer, for instance, refers to Apollo’s “shrine in Pytho” (Odyssey 8.94). The name “Delphi” came later.

c. However, this was not so among such Greek scholars as Spyridon Marinatos (1901–1974), the excavator of ancient Thera (modern Santorini), which was buried in a volcanic eruption around 1638 B.C. Marinatos argued that Delphi’s active geological history made it difficult to know what changes might have occurred over the past two millennia. He also made a report on an anemotrypa (wind hole) in the modern town of Delphi—a small cleft in the rock that emitted gas with a sulfurous smell. Scholars outside Greece ignored these ideas.

1. A.P. Oppé, “The Chasm at Delphi,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 24 (1904), pp. 214–240.

2. M.F. Courby, Topographie et architecture: la terasse du Temple: Fouilles de Delphes (1927), vol. 11, pp. 65–66.

3. Pierre Amandry, La mantique apollinienne a Delphes: Boccard (Paris, 1950), pp. 215–230.

4. See Isabella Herb, “Ethylene: Notes Taken from the Clinical Records,” in Anesthesia and Analgesia (December, 1923), pp. 210, 231–232; Herb, “Further Clinical Experiments with Ethylene-Oxygen Anesthesia,” Anesthesia and Analgesia (December, 1927), pp. 258–262; A.B. Luckhardt and J.B. Carter, “Physiologic Effects of Ethylene: A New Gas Anesthetic,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 80 (January–June 1923), pp. 765–770.

“Was She Really Stoned?” by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale appeared in the November/December 2002 issue of Archaeology Odyssey. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in May 2013.

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Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Thu, 30 May 2024 04:00:55 +0000

Read Theodore Feder’s article “Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle” as it originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2008. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in October 2012.—Ed.

Is it possible that the earliest existing picture of a scene from the Bible also includes the philosophers Socrates and Aristotle as onlookers? It is not only possible; I believe that is the case.

The earliest depiction of a Biblical scene comes from a site that is perhaps better known to some for its erotic art than for its religious devotions: Pompeii. The city was buried in volcanic ash in 79 A.D. following the eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius. It was a devastating tragedy for Pompeii’s residents but a boon to modern scholars and art historians.

In the building known as the House of the Physician, excavators found a wall painting clearly depicting King Solomon seated on a raised tribunal and flanked by two counselors. As described in the Bible, two women have come to the Israelite monarch, each claiming to be the mother of the same infant. When Solomon orders the baby to be divided in half, the real mother, shown at the foot of the dais, pleads with him to spare the child and announces her willingness to relinquish her claim. The other woman is shown standing by the butcher block on which the infant has been placed. As a soldier raises an axe to do the king’s bidding, she seizes what she believes will be her portion, saying, according to the Biblical text, “Let it be neither mine, nor thine, but divide it.” It is obvious who the real mother is. The child is given to her unharmed as soldiers and observers look on, marveling at Solomon’s wisdom (1 Kings 3:16–28).

Pleading for her baby’s life, a woman kneels at the feet of King Solomon and relinquishes her claim to the contested child, thus identifying herself as the real mother of the infant in 1 Kings 3:16–28. Nearby a soldier prepares to follow the king’s order to cut the baby in two, while another woman, also claiming to be the mother, stands ready to take her half. This Roman wall painting from the House of the Physician in Pompeii is the earliest known depiction of a Biblical scene—a surprising find in a city better known for its brothels and erotic art than its religious paintings. So who was the person that commissioned this painting: a Jew, a Christian or a gentile? Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

The wall painting has now been removed and is on exhibit at the Museo Nazionale in Naples. While it is therefore well known to scholars, it has not previously been noted that this is the earliest depiction of a full-fledged Biblical scene known to us!

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Was the painting commissioned by a Jew, an early Christian, a so-called God-fearer (gentiles who adopted many Jewish customs and beliefs, but did not convert^a) or simply an educated Roman?

There is good evidence that Jews lived in Pompeii. Kosher brands of the locally popular fish sauces were packed there and appropriately labeled Kosher Garum and Kosher Muria (garum castum, muria casta).¹ A two-word inscription, Sodoma Gomora, also survives from a house front in Pompeii and may have been written by a Jew or, less likely, by an early Christian, either before the eruption of Vesuvius or by a digger soon afterwards. It is perhaps more affecting to imagine its having been hastily written in the midst of the eruption by someone who analogized the town’s impending fate with that of the two doomed Biblical cities.

Wondering at the wisdom of King Solomon’s decision, two onlookers in the lower left corner of the painting observe the proceedings. Author Theodore Feder believes these clearly depicted figures represent the great Greek philosophers Socrates and Aristotle. With the creation of the Septuagint in the third century B.C., the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. The presence of these men in a Biblical scene suggests that the owner of this house was a gentile who wanted to draw a parallel between the Classical Greek sages and the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

My own feeling, however, is that it is more likely that the painting of Solomon displaying his wisdom was commissioned by a non-Jew. True, the Second Commandment’s prohibition against depicting the human form was not always obeyed by Jews in the Roman era.² But the injunction was particularly strong in the years leading up to the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 A.D., when protests against graven and painted images received a strong political as well as religious impetus. On stylistic grounds, the painting can be dated from the period immediately preceding the Vesuvius eruption in 79 A.D.

In any event, it is clear that the work reflects the influence of the Hebrew Bible. The Torah (the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses) was translated into Greek beginning in about 270 B.C., and the rest of the Bible was added in the immediately following centuries. According to one account, King Ptolmey II Philadelphus of Egypt wanted a copy of the Hebrew Bible for his great library in Alexandria.^b More likely, it was made by Jews for the Jews of Alexandria who did not know Hebrew. According to a traditional story, 70 scholars were isolated from each other on an island in Alexandria and instructed to prepare a Greek translation. When they were finished, all Greek copies were identical. Hence, this Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible is still known as the Septuagint.^c The Greek translation became available not only to the many Greek-speaking Hellenized Jews of the Mediterranean world, but to non-Jews as well. This text served as both a literary and iconographic source-book for Jew and gentile alike. Although the owner of the House of the Physician could in theory have been either a Jew, a so-called God-fearer, an early Christian or a Roman gentile, he was most likely a gentile, based simply on demographic grounds. In short, gentiles were more numerous, more likely to attain wealth, and under no prohibition with regard to depicting the human form.

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The painting contains all the essential narrative elements in the Biblical story without omissions or adumbrations. What’s more, it appears to have sprung whole from the artist’s imagination, as there is no known precedent in the history of art. As noted above, present are Solomon, the two mothers, the butcher block, the baby, the soldier waiting to divide it, and the onlookers who will attest to Solomon’s wisdom. The story has not received a more telling and cogent depiction in the 2,000 years since the painting’s creation.

Socrates has long been considered one of the founders of Western philosophy. Museo Pio Clementino at the Vatican. Alinari/Art Resource, NY

Over the years, a bald head, beard and flat nose became iconic features for depicting Socrates. The similarity to the figure in the Pompeian painting is so striking that he must be Socrates. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples Scala/Art Resource, NY

Among the onlookers are two figures in the lower left corner of the composition who are more fully delineated than the very lightly sketched group of figures immediately behind them. The features and poses of these two witnesses reflect surprise, wonder and admiration.

I believe these two figures are stand-ins for Socrates and Aristotle, introduced as a way of associating the wisdom of Solomon with that of the Greek philosophers. Put another way, their presence in the composition attests to the respect Greek philosophy could accord to Hebrew wisdom. Such a juxtaposition in art of wise men from the two civilizations was unprecedented, has rarely been done since, and is of great cultural and historical significance.

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The standing figure on the left has the bald head, flattened nose, and beard that almost always characterizes depictions of Socrates.

The figure to the right stands with his right leg thrust forward; his chin rests on his unsupported right arm in a classic thinker’s pose. He would be more natural if he were pictured seated. His features, however, correspond to a prototype for Aristotle: a full head of curly hair, little or no beard in this case and a regular profile. It is likely that the painter modeled Aristotle on a seated prototype derived from a Greek original that was copied in Roman times. A surviving example is the seated Aristotle from the Galleria Spada in Rome. There the pose is almost identical to the standing Aristotle of the Pompeian wall painting; the left leg is thrust forward and the head rests on an upraised arm which is in turn supported by Aristotle’s bent knee.

The Pompeian painter likely modeled his portrayal of the great philosopher Aristotle on an existing statue like this one but modified it to a standing position as seen in the completed painting. Scala/Art Resource, NY

The association of Jews with Greek wisdom and philosophy, though rare, was not entirely unknown in Hellenistic literature. In one of the earliest Greek references to the Jews, Clearchus of Soli (c. 300 B.C.), a disciple of Aristotle, quotes Aristotle as saying that the Jews are descended from Indian philosophers.³ In a similar vein, Theophrastus (372–288 B.C.) remarks that “being a race of philosophers, they converse with each other about divinity, and during the night they view the stars, turning their eyes to them and invoking their God with prayers.”⁴ This could serve as a still-accurate portrayal of synagogues in the modern era, where evening prayers (Maariv in Hebrew) are traditionally begun at sundown with the appearance of the first stars.

Numenius of Apamaea (Syria), a second-century A.D. Platonist, praised the Jews for worshiping an incorporeal God and declared that Plato had been but “a Moses in Attic garb,” here, too, making an association between the great thinkers of both cultures.⁵

The owner of the House of the Physician approved the depiction of this scene and likely proposed the subject matter to the painter. In selecting an episode from the Hebrew Bible, the patron departed from the canon of classical religious subject matter and elevated one from the Scriptures of a people whose influence at the time was spreading throughout the empire and would one day, in its Christian formulation, pervade it.

Theodore Feder is president and founder of Art Resource, the world’s largest photo archive of fine art, as well as president of the Artists Rights Society. He is author of Great Treasures of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Abbeville Press) and numerous articles.

Notes

1. August Mau, Pompeii, Its Life and Art, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 16.

2. See Harold H. Ellens, “The Library of Alexandria: The West’s Most Important Repository of Learning,” Bible Review 13:01.

3. On Sleep, quoted by Josephus, Against Apion I, 176–182.

4. On Piety, cited by Poryphry, third century A.D., in On Abstinence, 2.26. Meyer Reinhold and Louis Feldman, Jewish Life and Thought Among Greeks and Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), primary readings, p. 7.

5. Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1937), p. 157.

a. See Louis H. Feldman, “The Omnipresence of the God-Fearers”; Robert S. MacLennan and Thomas Kraabel, “The God-Fearers—A Literary and Theological Invention”; and Robert Tannenbaum, “Jews and God-Fearers in the Holy City of Aphrodite,” all in BAR, September/October 1986.

b. See Jacob Neusner, Symbol and Theology in Early Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 211, 216. Also, Erwin R Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953–1968).

c. Philo of Alexandria gives a full account of its composition in his “Life of Moses” (2.6: 31–37, 44) See also Leonard J. Greenspoon, “Mission to Alexandria: Truth and Legend About the Creation of the Septuagint, the First Bible Translation,” Bible Review 05:04.

“Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle” by Theodore Feder originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2008.

The Ancient Library of Alexandria

BAS Staff — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 14:00:37 +0000

When Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C.E.,
the Ptolemaic dynasty was given control of Egypt.
Ptolemy I (c. 367–283 B.C.E.) established his capital at Alexandria and immediately began to build up the city.
Ptolemy’s grandest project, begun in 306 B.C.E., was the Library of Alexandria, a research center that held one million books by the time of Jesus. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

In March of 415 C.E., on a sunny day in the holy season of Lent, Cyril of Alexandria, the most powerful Christian theologian in the world, murdered Hypatia, the most famous Greco-Roman philosopher of the time. Hypatia was slaughtered like an animal in the church of Caesarion, formerly a sanctuary of emperor worship.¹ Cyril may not have been among the gang that pulled Hypatia from her chariot, tearing off her clothes and slashing her with shards of broken tiles, but her murder was surely done under his authority and with his approval.

Cyril (c. 375–444) was the archbishop of Alexandria, the dominant cultural and religious center of the Mediterranean world of the fifth century C.E.² He replaced his uncle Theophilus in that lofty office in 412 and became both famous and infamous for his leadership in support of what would become known as Orthodox Christianity after the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451), when basic Christian doctrine was solidly established for all time.

Cyril’s fame arose mainly from his assaults on other church leaders, and his methods were often brutal and dishonest. He hated Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, for example, because Nestorius thought Christ’s divine and human aspects were distinct from one another, whereas Cyril emphasized their unity. At the Council of Ephesus in 431, Cyril arranged for a vote condemning Nestorius to take place before Nestorius’s supporters—the bishops from the eastern churches—had time to arrive. Nor was Cyril above abusing his opponents by staging marches and inciting riots. It was such a mob, led by one of Cyril’s followers, Peter the Reader, that butchered the last great Neoplatonic philosopher, Hypatia.

Cyril is honored today in Christendom as a saint. But at the time of his death, many of his fellow bishops expressed great relief at his departure. Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, wrote that Cyril’s “death made those who survived him joyful, but it grieved most probably the dead; and there is cause to fear lest, finding him too troublesome, they should send him back to us.”³

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One reason Cyril had Hypatia murdered, according to the English historian Edward Gibbon, was that Cyril thought Hypatia had the political ear of Alexandria’s chief magistrate, who vigorously opposed Cyril’s ambition to expel from the city those who held different religious views from his own.⁴ Cyril was also jealous of Hypatia because scholars from all over the world crowded into her lectures in Alexandria, Athens and elsewhere. Socrates (380–450), a church historian from Constantinople, says of Hypatia:

[She] was so learned that she surpassed all contemporary philosophers. She carried on the Platonic tradition derived from Plotinus, and instructed those who desired to learn in…philosophic discipline. Wherefore all those wishing to work at philosophy streamed in from all parts of the world, collecting around her on account of her learned and courageous character. She maintained a dignified intercourse with the chief people of the city. She was not ashamed to spend time in the society of men, for all esteemed her highly, and admired her for her purity.⁵

Hypatia’s father, Theon, was a leading professor of philosophy and science in Alexandria. He had prepared a recension of Euclid’s Elements, which remained the only known Greek text of the great mathematician’s work until an earlier version was discovered in the Vatican Library in this century.⁶ Theon also predicted eclipses of the sun and moon that occurred in 364.

Hypatia, who was born about 355, collaborated with her father from early in her life, editing his works and preparing them for publication. According to one authority, she was “by nature more refined and talented than her father.”⁷ The extant texts of Ptolemy’s Almagest and Handy Tables were probably prepared for publication by her.⁸

Such scientific and philosophical enterprises were not new or surprising in Hypatia’s Alexandria, which already boasted a 700-year-old, international reputation for sophisticated scholarship. Founded in 331 B.C.E.⁹ by command of Alexander the Great, the city contained almost from its beginnings an institution that would remain of immense importance to the world for the next 2,300 years. Originally called the Mouseion, or Shrine of the Muses, this research center and library grew into “an institution that may be conceived of as a library in the modern sense—an organization with a staff headed by a librarian that acquires and arranges bibliographic material for the use of qualified readers.”¹⁰

Learn about the dazzling discoveries coming out of the Alexander the Great-era tomb at Amphipolis in Greece.

Indeed, the Alexandria Library was much more. It “stimulated an intensive editorial program that spawned the development of critical editions, textual exegesis and such basic research tools as dictionaries, concordances and encyclopedias.”¹¹ The library in fact developed into a huge research institution comparable to a modern university—containing a center for the collection of books, a museum for the preservation of scientific artifacts, residences and workrooms for scholars, lecture halls and a refectory. In building this magnificent institution, one modern writer has noted, the Alexandrian scholars “started from scratch”; their gift to civilization is that we never had to start from scratch again.¹²

In 323 B.C.E., as summer was breaking upon the northern coast of Egypt, Alexander the Great died in Mesopotamia. Within little more than a year, Aristotle died in Chalcis and Demosthenes in Calaurie. To this day, these three gigantic figures, more than any others, save Jesus and Plato perhaps, remain essential to the ideal of civilized life throughout the world. The reason these and other figures remain alive for us today is the ancient library and “university” of Alexandria.¹³

When Alexander died, his empire was divided among his three senior commanders. Seleucis I Nicator became king of the empire’s eastern reaches, founding the Seleucid empire (312–64 B.C.E.) with its capital at Babylon.¹⁴ Antigonus I Monopthalmus (the One-Eyed) took possession of Macedonia, Greece and large parts of Asia Minor, where he established the Antigonid dynasty, which lasted until 169 B.C.E.¹⁵ A third commander, Ptolemy, assumed the position of satrap, or governor, of Egypt. Ptolemy made Alexandria his capital, brought Alexander’s body to the city for a royal entombment and quickly embarked upon a program of urban development.¹⁶

Ptolemy’s grandest building project was the Alexandria Library, which he founded in 306 B.C.E. Almost immediately the library epitomized the best scholarship of the ancient world, containing the intellectual riches of Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, Rome and Egypt. Until it was closed in 642 C.E.—when the Arabs conquered Egypt and carried off the library’s treasure—it was the major vehicle by which the learning of the past was kept alive.¹⁷ Not only did the library preserve the ancient sciences, but it proved to be a vital philosophical and spiritual force behind the surprising new worlds of Judaism, Neoplatonism and Christianity.

The history of the library and its university center falls into five stages. The first, from its founding in 306 B.C.E. to about 150 B.C.E., was the period of Aristotelian science, during which the scientific method was the dominant feature of scholarly investigation. The second, from 150 B.C.E. to 30 B.C.E., was marked by a decided shift away from Aristotelian empiricism to a Platonic preoccupation with metaphysics and religion. This period coincided with the consolidation of Roman influence in the Mediterranean basin. The third was the age of Philo Judaeus’s influence, from 30 B.C.E. to 150 C.E. The fourth was the era of the Catechetical School, 150 to 350 C.E., and the fifth was the period of the philosophical movement known as the Alexandrian School, 350 to 642 C.E. Together, these five stages cover a thousand years. No other institution of this kind has proved to be so long-lived or so intellectually dominant of its world and subsequent history as Alexandria’s library.

Sometime between 307 and 296 B.C.E., Ptolemy I brought from Athens a noted scholar named Demetrios of Phaleron (345–283 B.C.E.) to undertake his vast library project.

Demetrios set about this task with vigor, providing the course the library was to follow for a millennium. His genius lay in his conception of the library as something more than a receptacle for books; it was also to be a university where new knowledge would be produced. The library’s initial design called for ten halls for housing the books. These halls were connected to other university buildings by marble colonnades. Scholars were extended royal appointments with stipends to live and work in this university community. At the same time, task forces commissioned to acquire books were scouring the Mediterranean. Books were even confiscated from ships moored in Alexandria’s harbor, copied and then restored to their owners. The scriptorium where the copies were made also served as a bookstore, creating a lucrative enterprise with an international clientele.

In 283 B.C.E. Demetrios was succeeded as chief librarian by Zenodotus of Ephesus (325–260 B.C.E.), who held the office for 25 years. This brilliant scholar was a Greek grammarian, literary critic, poet and editor. He continued Demetrios’s work on Homer, making a detailed comparative study of the extant texts, deleting doubtful passages, transposing others and making emendations. He also produced the first critical editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey and set each of them up in the 24 books in which we have them today.

The Athenian Agora was a great center of ancient learning. Read about recent agora excavations in the Bible History Daily feature “Stoa Poikile Excavations in the Athenian Agora.”

It was probably Zenodotus who established as part of the library the public lending section known as the Serapeion—so named because it was a sanctuary for the god Serapis as well as a public library. He appointed two assistant librarians: Alexander of Aetolia (born c. 315 B.C.E.), to specialize in the Greek tragic and satiric plays and poetry; and Lycophron of Chalcis (born c. 325 B.C.E.), to concentrate on the comic poets. Both of these men became famous in their own right as writers and scholars.

One of the things we would most like to have today from the Alexandria library is its catalogue, called the Pinakes, the great work of Callimachus of Cyrene (c. 305–235 B.C.E.), who served under four chief librarians but never rose to that position himself. The full title of the Pinakes is Tablets of the Outstanding Works in the Whole of Greek Civilization.¹⁸ Pinakes means “tablets” and probably referred originally to the tablets or plaques attached to the stacks, cabinets and rooms of the library, identifying the library’s wide variety of books from numerous cultures, most of them translated into Greek.a

Although only fragments of the Pinakes have survived, we know quite a lot about it. Most dependable sources agree on the organizational method utilized in the catalogue, which amply demonstrates the sophisticated character of the ancient library. The Pinakes consisted of 120 scrolls, in which all the works in the library were organized by discipline, with a substantial bibliographical description for each work.¹⁹ The encyclopedia of knowledge as it has been conceptualized since ancient times is derived from Callimachus’s design. As a leading scholar has noted, “The Western tradition of author as main entry may be said to have originated with Callimachus’s Pinakes.”²⁰

The Pinakes identified each volume by its title, then recorded the name and birthplace of the author, the name of the author’s father and teachers, the place and nature of the author’s education, any nickname or pseudonym applied to the author, a short biography (including a list of the author’s works and a comment on their authenticity), the first line of the work specified, a brief digest of the volume, the source from which the book was acquired (such as the city where it was bought or the ship or traveler from which it was confiscated), the name of the former owner, the name of the scholar who edited or corrected the text, whether the book contained a single work or numerous distinct works, and the total number of lines in each work.²¹

The Pinakes was the first great library catalogue of western civilization, just as The Bible of Gutenberg was the first great printed book. [I]t earns for its author the title of “Father of Bibliography.” Thus, as in all intellectual efforts, the Greeks fixed the canons of cataloguing, which have been incorporated, more or less, in our Library of Congress, European, and other systems. However, the Pinakes was more than a catalogue. It was the work of the foremost man of letters of his age. He could not treat even a purely scientific subject as the Pinakes…without imparting to his work the rich stores of his scholarship, and thus the first world catalogue of knowledge became also the first literary and critical history of Hellenic literature, and also earned for its author the title of “Father of Literary History.”²²

By the end of Callimachus’s life, the library is purported to have contained 532,800 carefully catalogued books, 42,800 of which were in the lending library at the Serapeion. Two and a half centuries later, in the time of Jesus, it held one million volumes.²³

It was officials with the conquering Arab army who last saw the library in its operational state. Undoubtedly much of it was carried off to their royal libraries. It is likely that the character and structure of Callimachus’s Pinakes was used as a model for a brilliant Arabic counterpart from the tenth century known as the Al-Fihrist, or Index, by Ibn-Al-Nadim, which we have in virtually its complete and original form. Surviving fragments of the Pinakes confirm the likelihood of this.²⁴

For its first two centuries, the library at Alexandria continued to be a center for nearly every kind of research in the natural sciences as well as in philosophy and the humanities, employing the scientific method developed by Aristotle, which, thanks to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), forms the foundation of modern science.²⁵

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (275–195 B.C.E.), a student of Callimachus who rose to become chief librarian, is a classic example of the Alexandrian scholar of the period. He was an accomplished mathematician, geographer, astronomer, grammarian, chronographer, philologist, philosopher, historian and poet. He founded the sciences of astronomy, physical geography, geodetics and chronology. He was known as the most learned person of the Ptolemaic age²⁶ and was acclaimed by his contemporaries as second only to Plato as a literary thinker and philosopher.

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Eratosthenes dated the Trojan War to about 1184 B.C.E., a date generally accepted in ancient times and respected by many modern scholars. He worked out a calendar that included a leap year, and he calculated the tilt of the earth’s axis. One of his most memorable accomplishments was the invention of an accurate method for measuring the circumference of the earth (see the sidebar to this article).

During his tenure as chief librarian, Eratosthenes brought to Alexandria the official Athenian copies of the three great Attic tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. This involved a bit of scurrilous horse-trading: Ptolemy III approved an arrangement for borrowing these precious manuscripts from Athens, pledging the modern equivalent of $4 million as surety.²⁷ With the documents in hand, Ptolemy III then forfeited his deposit, cavalierly retaining the original manuscripts for the Alexandria Library, and instructed the staff to make good copies on fine quality papyrus, which were then sent back to Athens. “The Athenians with both the money and the copies,” one scholar has observed, “also appear to have been satisfied with the deal.”²⁸

Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257–180 B.C.E.) followed Eratosthenes as chief librarian and served for about 15 years. He was a man with a photographic memory and could cite at length the literary sources in the library.²⁹ He had read them all. It is said that while judging poetry competitions he regularly detected plagiarized lines, and on a number of occasions, when challenged by the king to justify his criticism, cited the sources and recited the original passages. As a philologist, grammarian and author, Aristophanes produced poetry, dramas and critical editions of the works of his famous namesake, Aristophanes (c. 450–c. 388 B.C.E.), the Greek poet and dramatist.

Near the end of his life, Aristophanes was imprisoned by Ptolemy V Epiphanes for entertaining an offer to move to the great library of Pergamum. Such repression did not create an ideal climate in which scholarship might flourish. After his imprisonment, the library languished under an interim director, Apollonius Eidograph. But in 175 B.C.E. a new chief librarian was appointed, Aristarchus of Samothrace (217–130 B.C.E.), who returned the institution to its grand tradition of high scholarship and scientific sophistication.

Aristarchus was chief librarian for 30 years, from 175 to 145 B.C.E. He is still considered one of the greatest literary scholars because his recension of the works of Homer continues to be the standard text (textus receptus) upon which all modern versions are based. Besides his two critical editions of Homer, he produced similarly erudite editions of Hesiod, Pindar, Archilochus, Alcaeus and Anacreon. He wrote commentaries on the works of all these classical poets as well as on the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes, and on the historian Herodotus.

Aristarchus had been the teacher of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II, and though the latter gained a reputation for being a monster, the two apparently remained friends. When a civil war and political insurgency against the king arose in 131 B.C.E., Aristarchus accompanied him in his banishment to Cyprus. There Aristarchus died before Ptolemy VIII returned in triumph in 130 B.C.E. to continue his oppressive reign for another 14 years. With his reign, the history of wise and humane Ptolemies and illustrious librarians ended. Thereafter, valuable scholarship continued in Alexandria, such as the work of Philo Judaeus (30 B.C.E.–50 C.E.), the Catechetical School of Clement and Origen (150–350 C.E.) and the Neoplatonic School (350–642 C.E.), but after 130 B.C.E. both kings and scholars were lesser lights. Revolutions, insurrections and persecutions wracked the kingdom as dynastic political intrigue plagued the country, the city and the scholarly community. By the end of Aristarchus’s tenure, such dissatisfaction existed among the scholars regarding the character of the king and the conditions of the scholarly community that Ptolemy VIII imposed a military controller upon the operations of the library.

Considering the extensive accumulation of scientific data collected by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and their advanced methods of empirical research, it is surprising that they did not achieve some key breakthrough in chemistry or physics that would have precipitated an industrial revolution. The Greeks and Romans both understood, for example, the power of steam produced by heated water. The Romans harnessed steam for powering toys. There is some indication that they employed it for powering siege guns. What held them back from utilizing it in steam-driven machinery, which would have enabled that giant leap from mere muscle to mechanical power? They had refined sciences of optics, geometry and physics. What prevented them from imagining and creating a microscope? They understood atomic theory in some coarse way. What prevented them from identifying the components of water as hydrogen and oxygen and thus moving on to the intricacies of chemistry? They seem to have marched right up to the intellectual and scientific threshold for mechanization and then fallen back into a 1,500-year darkness. Their sciences needed to be rediscovered and reinvented in the Renaissance of the 12th to 14th centuries before the next step forward could be made. Why?

The likely answer lies in the area of two cultural circumstances: (1) the shift in Alexandrian Library scholarship from Aristotelian empiricism to Platonic metaphysical speculation in about 100 B.C.E., and (2) the barbarian subduction of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries C.E.

Increasingly during this period of decline, the wealth and intellectual capital of Alexandria was dissipated in trying to maintain workable relations with the rising power of Rome. As the tribute to Rome increased, and the material investment in the library and its scholarship suffered, the superior intellectual importance, prowess and productivity that had been standard under the early Ptolemies proved impossible to maintain: “The dons were drawn into the political vortex, and those not so inclined were silent. The zest to produce the things of culture was permanently interrupted.”³⁰

One consequence of these disturbing times was an intense turn toward religion. Hellenistic Jews were experimenting with various kinds of theologies.³¹ In Greco-Roman culture, mystery religions were popular, despite the prominence of the emperor cult. The roots of Christianity, Gnosticism and rabbinic Judaism were already insinuating themselves into the rich soil of this uneasy world. In Alexandria, the scholarly community abandoned its intense, fruitful focus upon empirical science after the mode of Aristotle and lost itself in the scholarly inquiry into the religion and philosophy of Platonism.

Father of geometry. The Alexandrian scholar Euclid is depicted calipers in hand by the 15th-century Dutch painter Joos van Ghent; the work is now in the Palazzo Ducale, in Urbino, Italy. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Although the decline of the golden age of the ancient library and university center is sad to contemplate, the “sea change” nevertheless ushered in the newly productive era of the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo Judaeus (30 B.C.E.–50 C.E.); the Hellenistic Neoplatonism of Plotinus (205–270 C.E.), Porphyry (c. 234–305 C.E.), Olympius (c. 350–391 C.E.) and Hypatia (355–415 C.E.); and the Hellenistic Christianity of Pantaenus (c. 100–160 C.E.), Clement (c. 150–215 C.E.), Origen (c. 185–254 C.E.), Tertullian (c. 155–225 C.E.), Athanasius (c. 293–373 C.E.) and Cyril of Alexandria (c. 375–444 C.E.). So the scholarly culture of the ancient library became the seedbed of the great philosophies of Judaism and Christianity and thus has continued to influence Western culture for two millennia, showing little sign of abating as we move into the third.

Philo Judaeus was surely one of the most prominent scholars in Alexandria at the turn of the millennium. His life overlaps that of Jesus of Nazareth and is the scholarly bridge between the pre-Christian era of Greek antiquity and the begin ning of Christian history in Alexandria. With the appearance of Philo, Jewish scholarship became a prominent force there. Philo was a member of a distinguished Jewish family in the influential Alexandrian Jewish community. His brother, Alexander the Alabarch, led that community. Philo lived much of his life in contemplation, authoring a large array of books.

The Jewish community included half of the city of Alexandria in Philo’s time and a large part of the general population of Egypt. Philo and his contemporaries considered themselves to be faithful Jews. Hellenized Judaism was generally welcomed by the Jews of Egypt and provided both an interpretation of Judaism for the Greeks and an interpretation of Hellenism for Jewish society, stretching the whole upon the frame of historic Jewish traditions.

Philo sought to demonstrate that Judaism could be accepted by the Greeks for its universal wisdom and superior insight into ultimate truth. The subjects Philo treated and the organization he used reflect the pattern set for scholarship at the library by Callimachus’s Pinakes. Philo systematically addressed the full range of topics that had formed the categories of that great catalogue. His writings include investigations of theology, philosophy, literary criticism, textual analysis, rhetoric, history, law, medicine and cosmology. However, Philo was not simply interested in objective scientific exploration. His greatest motive was to demonstrate that all that is valuable and virtuous in Greek thought and ideals was also epitomized by the biblical patriarchs and heroes of faith of Jewish religious tradition. Philo treated the Greek notion of Logos, for example, as the universal expression of Hebrew Wisdom (Khokhma in Hebrew; Sophia in Greek), God’s self-expression in the material world.

Philo lived at a time when confidence in a world governed by cause and effect had given over to questions about the purpose of life and history. His questions concerned the nature of God; God’s function in the universe as creator, manager and redeemer; and the meaning and destiny of humankind. The primary question for Platonic-minded scholars and laypersons alike was how a transcendent, ineffable God of pure spirit could be linked to a material universe. Moreover, it seemed evident that the material world was shot through with pain and evil. How could a perfect God create a flawed world?

In both the Jewish and Greek traditions that Philo inherited, this problem was solved by a model of the world in which God was separated from the created universe by a series of intermediaries. These were thought of as divine forces, agencies or persons. The main intermediary was the Logos. The Greek Stoic philosophers had made much of the concept of Logos from the time of early Platonism onward. Philo saw Greek tradition as simply another expression of the references to Wisdom in Job 28, Proverbs 1–9, The Wisdom of Ben Sirach, Baruch and other literature in the Hebrew tradition. Philo understood the Logos to be responsible for creating the material universe, supervising it providentially and redeeming it. For Philo, Logos was God’s rationality, both in God’s own mind and in the rational structure of creation. Sophia was the understanding that God has and that humans acquire when they discover God’s Logos in all things. Philo, on occasion, allegorically refers to Logos/Sophia as an angel and, rarely, as a “second God.” In his exposition of Genesis 17 (describing God’s covenant with Abraham), he characterizes God as a trinity of agencies.³²

Between 150 and 180 C.E. a Stoic philosopher named Pantaenus was converted to Christianity and became the headmaster, if not the founder, of a Christian institution known as the Catechetical School of Alexandria. This school reflected the long-standing intellectual tradition of the Alexandrian Library and may well have been a part of that scholarly enterprise.³³

Pantaenus served as head of the Catechetical School long enough to bring it out of obscurity and then, handing over its leadership to Clement, became a missionary. In India Pantaenus discovered a community of Jewish Christians, disciples of the apostle Thomas, whose faith and life were built around their use of a Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew. Pantaenus never returned to Alexandria.³⁴

Clement (c. 150–215 C.E.) was a student of Pantaenus, and Origen (c. 185–254) was very probably a student of Clement. The theological connection between them, as well as their dependence upon Philo’s work of 150 years earlier, urges this conclusion. Clement and Origen seem to have taken over Philo’s model of God’s relationship to the created world, particularly the function of the Logos in creation, providence and salvation.

These two towering figures of early Christian theological development were headmasters of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, which flourished under them and quickly became famous throughout the Christian world. Eusebius (c. 260–348), a church historian, refers to it as “a school of sacred learning established…from ancient times, which has continued down to our own times, and which we have understood was held by men able in eloquence, and the study of divine things.”³⁵

Its relationship to Philo and his classical Greek predecessors has been described as follows:

The first representatives of early church exegesis were not the bishops but rather the “teachers” (didaskaloi) of the catechetical schools, modeled after the Hellenistic philosophers’ schools in which interpretive and philological principles had been developed according to the traditions of the founders of the respective schools. The allegorical interpretation of Greek classical philosophical and poetical texts, which was prevalent at the Library and Museum (the school) of Alexandria, for example, directly influenced the exegetical method of the Christian Catechetical school there. Basing his principles on the methods of Philo of Alexandria and Clement of Alexandria, his teacher, and others, Origen…created the foundation for the type of Christian exegesis (i.e., the typological-allegorical method) that lasted from the patristic period and the Middle Ages up to the time of Luther in the 16th century. Origen based his exegesis upon comprehensive textual-critical work that was common to current Hellenistic practices such as collecting Hebrew texts and Greek parallel translations of the Old Testament. His main concern, however, was that of ascertaining the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures, the transhistorical divine truth that is hidden in the records of the history of salvation in the Scriptures. He thus developed a system containing four types of interpretation: literal, moral, typological, and allegorical.³⁶

Clement’s theological and philosophical emphasis differed little from that of Philo, except that the orientation of his notion of the Logos/Sophia doctrine was Christian rather than Jewish. Clement’s aim in his teaching and ministry was to convert to Christianity members of the educated Greek community in Alexandria, the sort of people who would previously have been attracted to Philo’s type of Hellenistic Judaism. “Just as Philo had presented Judaism as the highest form of wisdom and the means by which humankind would come to ‘see God,’ so Clement urged that Christianity was the end to which all current philosophy had been moving…the new melody superior to that of Orpheus.”³⁷

Origen advanced Clement’s ideas and directly identified the Logos with the person of Jesus of Nazareth, thus personifying the Logos. Such personification of the Logos was not uncommon in the world of Philo, Clement and Origen. Indeed, it was a relatively common practice in both Jewish and Greek tradition to conceive of divine powers or agents as identified at various times with specific extraordinary persons. As the divine agency was personified in a human person, the divine was humanized and the human deified.

It was this significant North African theological perspective in the theology of Clement and Origen that dominated Christian thought from the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. to the Council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E. At these councils the doctrines of the deity of Christ and the trinitarian nature of God were worked out. Thus, there is a straight line between the Alexandria Library, Philo Judaeus’s Hellenistic Judaism and the Christian doctrines of the deity of Christ and the nature of the trinity. This connection is, of course, very complex, and other forces also affected this development, such as the great variety of polytheistic theologies (which propose that there exist intermediary beings between God and creation) present in the Judaisms of 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. and that Philo wished to counteract in order to refine and protect Jewish monotheism. However, it is the influence of Philo’s theological and philosophical model (mediated through Clement and Origen to the bishops who met at the great councils), combined with the very speculative allegorical interpretation of scripture under the influence of Neoplatonism (typical of the outlook in Alexandria), that explains the theological move of the councils from a Jesus who was filled with the Logos to a Christ who was the being of God.

As this Judeo-Christian development unfolded, the seeds of the Alexandrian school were sown at the ancient library and its university. Plotinus (205–270 C.E.) established the movement with his articulation of a new kind of Platonism. Many similarities can be seen between this Neoplatonism and Judaism and Christianity in the second and third centuries C.E. Neoplatonism stood for an intense personal spirituality, estimable ethical principles and a theology rooted in the Hellenistic philosophy that so significantly shaped Philo.

Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry (c. 234–305 C.E.) looked for the ultimate religious experience as an ecstatic vision of God, adhered to standards of personal purity that made the most ardent Christian envious and proclaimed that God is revealed in the material world in a trinity of manifestations. This singularly attractive alternative to Christianity was championed in the fourth and fifth centuries in Alexandria by the notable Neoplatonist “saints,” Olympius and Hypatia—bringing us back to where we started.

Although Hypatia was brutally murdered by Cyril for advocating a philosophy he thought was antithetical to “orthodox” Christianity, her brand of Neoplatonism became increasingly attractive to Christian philosophers. By the sixth century, it was taken over by them. Though the Alexandrian school was formally eclipsed when the Arabs destroyed the library—and much of the city—in 642, its spirit survives to this day in its influence over Christianity.

That is the story of the Alexandria Library, too. After destroying the library, the Arabs preserved a large percentage of the ancient volumes—as evidenced by the fact that they possessed, in Greek and Arabic translations, many of the works of the ancient poets, playwrights, scientists and philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Eratosthenes. When the European Crusaders encountered the Arabic world in the 11th and 12th centuries, those venerable works became known again in Europe, giving rise to the Renaissance. Islamic philosophers and scientists—such as Averröes, a Spanish Arab (1126–1198 C.E.), and Avicenna, a Persian (980–1037 C.E.)—gave the ancient books and their wisdom back to the Western world and taught Christian Europe to know again and prize its roots in ancient Greece.

So the ancient library of Alexandria rose like a phoenix from her own ashes. She has been wounded, perhaps, but has never really died.

“The Ancient Library of Alexandria” by J. Harold Ellens originally appeared in the February 1997 issue of Bible Review. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in May 2013.

J. Harold Ellens is a retired scholar who researched at the University of Michigan and served as an occasional lecturer for the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate School in California. He is the author of hundreds of articles and numerous books, including The Ancient Library of Alexandria and Early Christian Theological Development (Claremont Graduate School, 1993).

Notes:

a. The best-known book collected from a non-Greek culture and translated into Greek at the library was the Hebrew Bible, known in its Greek form as the Septuagint (LXX). It seems to have reached the state of a largely completed and official Greek text between 150 and 50 B.C.E. Philo Judaeus (30 B.C.E.–50 C.E.) obviously knew and worked with a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible.

1. Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), p. 93. Cf. J. Harold Ellens, The Ancient Library of Alexandria and Early Christian Theological Development, Occasional Papers 27, Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (Claremont: Claremont Graduate School, 1993), pp. 44–51.

2. “Saint Cyril of Alexandria,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 3, cols. 329–330.

3. Theodoret, quoted in The Works of Charles Kingsley, 2 vols. (New York: Co-operative Publishing Society, 1899).

4. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J.B. Bury, 3 vols., with notes by Gibbon, introduction and index by Bury and a letter to the reader from P. Guedalla (New York: Heritage, 1946).

5. Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica 7.15, in A.C. Zenos, ed., vol. 2 of The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2d ser., ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), p. 160. See also Edward A. Parsons, The Alexandrian Library, Glory of the Hellenic World: Its Rise, Antiquities, and Destructions (London: Cleaver-Hume, 1952), p. 356.

6. “Theon of Alexandria,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 9, col. 938; “Euclid,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 6, col. 1020; Ellens, Alexandria, p. 44; and Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, pp. 68–69.

7. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, p. 70, quoting Damascius without citing what source.

8. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, pp. 70–73.

9. Steven Blake Shubert, “The Oriental Origins of the Alexandrian Library,” Libri 43:2 (1993), p. 143.

10. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” pp. 142–143.

11. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 143.

12. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 143.

13. Ellens, Alexandria, pp. 1–2.

14. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 16, cols. 501–503.

15. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 1, cols. 990–991.

16. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 15, cols. 180–182.

17. For a detailed discussion of the date of the destruction of the library, see Ellens, Alexandria, pp. 6–12, 50–51; and the superbly objective and thorough treatment of the process of the library’s demise by Mostafa El-Abbadi, Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (Paris: UNESCO/UNDP, 1990), pp. 145–179. See also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 1, pp. 57–58, and vol. 2, chap. 28 (on the destruction of the library); and Parsons, Alexandrian Library, pp. 411–412.

18. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 144, in which reference is made to the tenth-century C.E. Byzantine Greek volume called the Suidas Lexicon. This lexicon cites the full name of the Pinakes and describes its size as 120 scrolls. Cf. Ellens, Alexandria, p. 3; and F. J. Witty, “The Pinakes of Callimachus,” Library Quarterly 28 (1958), p. 133.

19. Suidas Lexicon; Tzetzes, as cited in El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, p. 101. See also Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 144; and Witty, “Pinakes of Callimachus.”

20. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” p. 144. It is interesting in this regard that Anne Holmes (“The Alexandrian Library,” Libri 30 [December 1980], p. 21) suggests that the Pinakes may have been a list of authors and books that Callimachus wanted to acquire for the library rather than a catalogue of existing library holdings. This is unlikely because of the detailed bibliographical and critical material incorporated in each entry, including the indication that the book was purchased from some other library source or confiscated from some traveler. Lionel Casson (“Triumphs from the Ancient World’s First Think Tank,” Smithsonian 10 [June 1985], p. 164) urges that the Pinakes was conceivably only an encyclopedia of Greek literary history. In such a case, one wonders why it was called the Pinakes, connecting it with the tiles designating the categories of storage compartments and their contents.

21. El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, p. 100; and Parsons, Alexandrian Library, p. 211. See also J.E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1906–1908), p. 34 n. 3.

22. Parsons, Alexandrian Library, pp. 217–218.

23. Parsons, Alexandrian Library, pp. 110, 204–205. See also El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, pp. 95, 100; and Tzetzes, a 12th-century scholar whose Prolegomena to Aristophanes, also known as Scholium Plautinum, may be found in R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), p. 101.

24. El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, p. 102.

25. Kathleen Marguerite Lea, “Francis Bacon,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., vol. 2, cols. 561–566. See also Catherine Drinker Bowen, Francis Bacon, The Temper of a Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963).

26. Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (New York: Scribner, 1897), p. 387.

27. Casson, “Triumphs.” The ancient sources describe the sum as 15 talents, which would probably exceed $4 million today.

28. Shubert, “Oriental Origins,” pp. 145, 166 n. 8, cites Galen’s Comm. II in Hippocraits Epidem. libri III 239–240, which I have not been able to consult. See also J. Platthy, Sources on the Earliest Greek Libraries (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1968), pp. 118–119; Holmes, “Alexandrian Library,” p. 290; and P.M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. 325.

29. Vitruvius, De Architectura 7.6–8. See also Parsons, Alexandrian Library, p. 150; and El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, pp. 105, 111. Vitruvius lived during the same period as Julius Caesar, Philo Judaeus and Jesus Christ. He was a famous Roman architect, engineer and city planner. The work cited here is a handbook for Roman architects. His style for architecture and city planning was largely Greek, as he lived at the beginning of the phase of creative Roman architectural style, and his work heavily influenced Renaissance art, architecture and engineering. Pliny the Elder borrowed heavily from Vitruvius in the preparation of his Natural History. As was typical in the ancient world, Pliny does not cite his sources and credit Vitruvius. De Architectura contains ten books on building materials, Greek designs in temple construction, private buildings, floors and stucco decoration, hydraulics, clocks, measurement skills, astronomy, and civil and military engines. He was classically Hellenistic in his perspective.

30. Parsons, Alexandrian Library, p. 152; see also p. 229, where Parsons, citing a letter from Thomas E. Page to James Loeb, declares that “But for the patronage of the Ptolemies and the labor of devoted students in the Museum, Homer…might have wholly perished, and we might know nothing of Aeschylus…We still owe Alexandria a great debt.” Murray (Literature, p. 388) remarks, “Zenodotus, Callimachus [sic], Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus were the first five librarians; what institution has ever had such a row of giants at its head?”

31. In this regard see, for example, Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977); Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God, The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991); Jarl Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord, Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism (Tübingen: Mohr, 1985); Gabrielle Boccaccini, Middle Judaism, Jewish Thought, 300 B.C.E.-200 C.E. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).

32. Philo Judaeus, The Works of Philo, trans. C.D. Yonge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993). See also Harry A. Wolfson, Philo, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947).

33. Some scholars question whether there really was a formal catechetical school as early as the second century, rather than just independent teachers; see Roelof van den Broek, “The Christian ‘School’ of Alexandria in the Second and Third Centuries,” in Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East, ed. J.W. Drijvers and A.A. MacDonald (Leiden: Brill, 1995). The preponderance of evidence, however, strongly indicates that there was one; see W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), p. 286; Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1955), pp. 190–191, 217–255; Schaff and Wace, eds., The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), pp. 224–226, 249–281; and G. Bardy, “Aux origines de l’ecole d’Alexandrie,” Reserches de Science Religieuse 27 (1937), pp. 65–90.

34. Frend, Rise of Christianity, p. 286.

35. Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, p. 190. See also Annewies van den Hoek, “How Alexandrian Was Clement of Alexandria? Reflections on Clement and His Alexandrian Background,” HeyJ31 (1990), pp. 179–194.

36. Ernst Wilhelm Bentz, “Christianity,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, vol. 4, col. 498.

37. Frend, Rise of Christianity, p. 286.

The post The Ancient Library of Alexandria appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

The Athenian Acropolis

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 16:24:24 +0000

Harrison Eiteljorg, II’s article “Antiquity’s High Holy Place: The Athenian Acropolis” was originally published in the November/December 2004 issue of Archaeology Odyssey. BAS Library Members can read every article ever published in AO online.

In 480 B.C.E. the Persians invaded Athens. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, they “plundered the temple and burnt the whole of the Acropolis.”¹ Although the Athenians and their allies followed up with a victory at the famous naval battle of Salamis, the Persian army returned the following year and “burnt Athens and utterly demolished whatever wall or house or temple was left standing.”² Ten years earlier, in 490 B.C.E., the Persian king Darius had invaded Greece, only to be thwarted on the plain of Marathon northeast of Athens. The devastating attacks of 480 and 479 B.C.E. were the revenge of Darius’s son and heir, Xerxes.

The setting sun illuminates Athens’s Acropolis (literally, High City) in the photo taken from the southwest. Prior to its destruction by the Persians in 490 B.C.E. and again in 480–479 B.C.E., the Acropolis was a sacred precinct with a temple to Athens’s tutelary goddess, Athena. The rebuilding of the Acropolis in the second half of the fifth century B.C.E. was the inspiration of the leader Pericles (c. 495–429 B.C.E.), who appointed the sculptor Phidias to supervise the entire project. Photo: Photo by AP/Petros Giannakporis.

The Greeks forced the Persians to retreat from the country shortly after the second sacking of the city (though the Persian Wars would continue for another 30 years). The Athenians then “prepared to rebuild their city and their walls,” according to the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460–400 B.C.E.). “For only isolated portions of the circumference had been left standing, and most of the houses were in ruins.”³

The city and its defensive walls were the first order of business—not the Acropolis, which also lay in ruins. The Acropolis was cleaned up enough to permit worship at its altars, and the gate was made secure again to protect not only the sacred places but the state treasury, which was kept on the Acropolis. So it wasn’t until the Persians had been fully vanquished and peace declared that the Athenians turned to repairing the Acropolis.

Fortunately, the Persian destruction of the Acropolis was not as complete as the ancient historians imply. Still standing, for example, were portions of the Old Temple of Athena, which housed the image of Athena Polias, the city’s patron deity. In addition, the so-called Older Parthenon, a temple that was under construction when Xerxes attacked, was still partially standing, though burnt and severely damaged. Nonetheless, the Acropolis we think of today, an imposing fortress-like hill with four magnificent buildings—the Parthenon, the Propylaea (entrance building), the Temple of Athena Nike and the Erechtheum—is almost entirely a creation of the second half of the fifth century B.C.E.

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Much of the work took place under the auspices of Athens’s leader Pericles (c. 495–429 B.C.E.), who intended to make the Acropolis a lasting memorial to the Greek spirit and to the glory of Athens. However, all who worked on the Acropolis were constrained by the remains of the buildings damaged by the Persians and the requirements of the cult places on the Acropolis.

The Parthenon and Erechtheum are the most prominent buildings in the photo taken from the southeast. The small niche jutting north from the Erechtheum (toward the Parthenon) is the Porch of the Caryatids. Three columns of the eastern facade of the Propylaea (the entrance to the Acropolis) are visible just beyond and to the right of the Parthenon. Photo: Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Corbis.

The first structure erected as part of Pericles’s renovation of the Acropolis was the Parthenon, which was designed by the architect Ictinus with the aid of Callicrates. The Parthenon was built between 449 and 437 B.C.E., and it was built on the platform of the Older Parthenon. That platform was both enlarged and shifted for the new structure, and much of the damaged material from the Older Parthenon was used in the new structure. Recent examinations of the walls of the Parthenon, for instance, show that wall blocks from the Older Parthenon were re-used but reversed so that the damaged surfaces could not be seen.

In design, the Parthenon is a fairly typical Greek temple, though it was larger than most (228 feet by 101 feet) and built entirely of marble quarried at nearby Mt. Pentelikon (visible near the road into Athens from the new airport). The core of the structure is a simple rectangular building divided into two rooms, which are entered from the outside (that is, from opposite ends of the core). The larger, east-facing room is the temple’s cella, or cult room. The smaller, west-facing room, or opisthodomos, would have held offerings and other valuables in antiquity. In front of each room is a shallow portico, itself fronted by a line of six columns. A colonnade of 46 Doric columns encloses the core and porches—eight columns on the ends and seventeen on the long sides (counting each corner column twice). In antiquity, the entire structure was also covered with a roof, now almost entirely missing. Even the roof tiles were carved of marble rather than molded of terracotta.

Photo: From The Greek World.

The Parthenon represents the culmination of skills and traditions that had guided the Doric style in Greek architecture over the preceding centuries, and it can be seen as the ultimate achievement of architecture guided by a craft tradition. Much of what makes the Parthenon so magnificent involves an artistic subtlety that cannot be planned mathematically but stems from an individual stone mason’s training and experience and the accumulated experience passed down over generations.

For example, the floor of the Parthenon is not flat. Its four corners lie approximately at the same elevation, but the floor curves slightly upward (rising from the corners to the middle of each side, and rising still higher to the center of the building), so that the surface is convex, with the lowest points of the floor at the corners and the highest point at the center. Whether this design was a practical requirement for shedding rain water or an optical refinement to make the floor appear flat is irrelevant. It endows the structure with a sculptural quality. Only skilled, experienced masons could have accomplished this design.

This sculptural quality is enhanced by the designs of the columns. The diameter of each column is reduced from bottom to top, but not continuously; instead, the columns curve and swell along their edges so that they are often said to be cigar-shaped. Modern neoclassical buildings rarely employ this subtlety (called entasis), and their columns, as a result, seem brittle, ready to snap. By contrast, the Parthenon’s columns (and those of most ancient structures) seem to have accepted the weight they bear and to be prepared to stand for eternity.

The columns are also positioned as a sculptor, rather than an engineer, would place them. They are not vertical; they lean slightly back, toward the core of the structure, out of plumb by about one centimeter. This attention to detail can also be seen in the corner columns, which lean slightly back toward the diagonally opposite corner. The corner columns are also a little larger in diameter than the others.

The columns are also unevenly spaced around the perimeter of the temple. The nature of the Doric triglyph-metope frieze (see box) creates a conflict at the corners. As a result, the corner columns and the columns next to them have been adjusted to create spacing that may appear to be regular but is not. The frieze was also adjusted so that the final effect is of both a regular frieze and a regular colonnade, though both are subtly irregular.

The Parthenon’s entablature isn’t horizontal either. The beams of the architrave and the frieze directly above it share the curvature of the floor, rising from corner to center and falling again from center to corner, making the entire structure seem elastic and alive—a surprising effect, given the use of so solid a building material as marble.

All the subtle adjustments in the Parthenon’s design made it impossible for most of the blocks of the structure to be cut as simple right-angled blocks. Each was, in the end, carved to fit its particular spot, with surfaces that might be curved rather than flat and that might not be at right angles to one another. The skill and training of the masons were essential.

As a temple and the home of the warrior-virgin Athena, known as Athena Parthenos, the Parthenon’s sculpture illustrates mythico-religious themes. The birth of Athena and the struggle between Athena and Poseidon to become Athens’s patron filled the two pediments, and various other mythical contests filled the metopes.

Pericles chose Phidias (c. 465–425 B.C.E.), the most famous Greek sculptor of the day, as supervisor of the sculptural program for the building. (Phidias was also selected to supervise the planning of the Acropolis as a whole.) Phidias’s own great sculpture, the statue of Athena gazing out toward the altar, stood in the cella. Made of ivory and gold on a core of wood,^a the sculpture depicted a helmeted Athena holding a spear in one hand and a figure of the victory goddess Nike in the other. Though long since destroyed, the statue is well known to us, as it was often shown on ancient coins, and it was described in great detail by the second-century C.E. Roman traveler Pausanias: “The statue of Athena is upright, with a tunic reaching to the feet, and on her breast the head of Medusa [Athena’s emblematic Aegis] is worked in ivory. She holds a statue of Victory about four cubits high.”⁴ (Since four cubits were about 6 feet, Athena held a life-size statue in her hand.)

Learn about the Stoa Poikile excavations in the Athenian Agora in Bible History Daily >>

Athenian youths carry offering jars in this relief from the Parthenon’s 524-foot-long frieze. Set in the entablature (see box) of the inner colonnade, which enclosed the core of the Parthenon, the frieze was obscured by the entablature of the outer colonnade—making it very difficult for visitors to view the carvings. The frieze may have depicted the Greater Panathenaea, a procession held every four years in which a new peplos (an ancient garment) was draped over the statue of Athena in the Old Temple of Athena. In the early 19th century, Lord Elgin removed 247 feet of the frieze to the British Museum, where it remains on display to this day. Photo: From Ancient Greece.

The most famous portion of the Parthenon’s sculpture was the continuous frieze band that lay above the outer wall of the core, facing outward. This positioning meant that the frieze was obscured by the entablature; it was thus visible only from below and only with the aid of reflected light reaching into a naturally dim area. (This kind of positioning was never again used in antiquity, suggesting that its disadvantages were recognized.) Indeed, given that the frieze was so difficult to see, its fame is a testament to its beauty.

Once about 524 feet long,^b the frieze depicted a procession of young horsemen, older men, chariots, cattle and horses, youths bearing jars on their shoulders, musicians, men possibly serving as parade marshals and a few women, most of them carrying ritual vessels. The parade was really two parades, both beginning at the southwest corner: One group moved east along the south side of the building, then north along the east facade; the other group moved north along the west facade, east along the north side of the building, and then south along the east facade to face the other group. The two groups converged to face the culminating scene above the east portico. There the Olympian gods, seated, watched a ceremony most commonly interpreted as the presentation of a new peplos (an ancient garment) to Athena. This procession may depict the central event of the Greater Panathenaea (held every four years), when such a garment was brought to the Old Temple of Athena to adorn the image of the goddess (in fact, however, our knowledge of the meaning of the frieze is not very certain; we will probably never know exactly what was depicted on it).

The Parthenon looks very different today from the way it looked in the fifth century B.C.E. Today we see the soft, subtly changing tones of weathered marble—gray in dull light, almost white in the bright sun, and a warm golden color at sunset. But in antiquity the Parthenon’s sculptures and the building itself were enlivened with color. The overall effect must have been stunning, with even moldings and portions of the ceilings painted red, green, blue or gold. So fixed is our impression of what a Greek ruin should look like that we would undoubtedly be shocked, perhaps even outraged, if some present-day restorer took it upon himself to splash a variety of colors on the Acropolis. Our outrage, of course, would be entirely misguided.

The Parthenon was built in a very short time, from 449 to 437 B.C.E., though the sculpture was not completed until 432. The speed of the building process is remarkable. In one sense, though, it was never finished, since Athenians continued to nail small dedications to its walls in the years following its erection.

Check out the article “The Oracle of Delphi—Was She Really Stoned?” in Bible History Daily.

The construction of the Parthenon had just been completed—though not the sculpture—when a monumental entrance structure for the entire precinct was started: the Propylaea, through which all who enter the Acropolis must pass even today.

Visitors to the Acropolis (ancient and modern) pass through the great entranceway, called the Propylaea, at the sanctuary’s western side. The Propylaea is a U-shaped complex with a central, rectangular chamber and wings to the north and south. To get to the Acropolis sanctuary, visitors walk up the steps, enter the central chamber, which is divided by a wall (now covered in scaffolding) into western and eastern rooms, and pass through each of the rooms before stepping onto the sacred precinct. Then they can continue on to the Parthenon (clearly visible in the photo) and the Erechtheum. Photo: Duby Tal/Albatross.

The Propylaea’s northern wing (to the left of the central chamber) was probably a room used for ritual dining, with a porch fronted by a colonnade. The southern wing also had a columned porch, though the purpose of this wing was simply to allow access to the Temple of Athena Nike at the wing’s westernmost edge.

Like the Parthenon, the Propylaea replaced an earlier less-impressive structure. Designed by an architect named Mnesicles, the Propylaea was built to fulfill three primary functions: It would guard the entrance to the Acropolis, preventing thieves, runaway slaves and the unclean from entering;^c it would include a room for ritual dining; and it would provide access to the sanctuary of Athena Nike. Mnesicles’s task was quite different from that of his colleague Ictinus, the architect of the Parthenon. Not only did his building have to serve multiple unrelated functions but he had to build it on a very steep slope.

The Propylaea’s northern wing (to the left of the central chamber in the photo) was probably a room used for ritual dining, with a porch fronted by a colonnade. The southern wing also had a columned porch, though the purpose of this wing was simply to allow access to the Temple of Athena Nike at the wing’s westernmost edge (bottom right in the photo). The temple, covered with scaffolding in the photo, is now undergoing reconstruction.

If Ictinus was essentially a sculptor working on a large scale, Mnesicles resembled more a modern architect or engineer. He could have designed three separate buildings to fulfill the required functions, but he made the more difficult and more aesthetically satisfying choice of creating a unified structure, a task that required a complexity of design unknown in previous Greek architecture. Mnesicles needed to plan his structure more fully and carefully than did his contemporaries working on other buildings—despite the fact that his planning tools were, to the best of our knowledge, extremely limited. Scaled drawings were unknown, and we have no evidence for scale models. He could not rely on masons and their experience for the complexities; the building he conceived went well beyond their experience, as well as his own.

The core of the Propylaea is a deceptively simple rectangular structure with a wall dividing it into two porches—a western and eastern porch—each with a six-column colonnade on its exterior. (Thus Mnesicles presented two temple-like facades, with columns and a pediment above, one to visitors entering the Acropolis and one to those leaving the Acropolis). To enter the sanctuary, one walked up the steps into the outer porch, passed through one of the five doorways in the wall into the inner porch, and then entered the Acropolis.

The outer porch offered shelter to those waiting for the sanctuary to open, so it was deeper, occupying about two-thirds of the depth of the whole. To make the structure more complex, Mnesicles designed the eastern porch at a slightly higher level than the western porch (the roof level is also raised, but not as much); visitors had to climb five steps before passing through one of the doorways into the eastern porch. This change of levels was required by the difficult, steeply-pitched site; it allowed visitors to reach the level of the Acropolis while passing through the Propylaea.

Grafted onto the central building were two wings, both on the west side and therefore lower than and outside the sacred area of the Acropolis. The northwest wing seems to have been a room for ritual dining, with a shallow colonnaded porch in front. The southwest wing only provided a passage to the small sanctuary of Athena Nike. Although the southern wing was much shallower and only about two-thirds as wide as the northern one, the two wings present virtually identical facades to the visitor who looks left and right while passing into the central building. However, the apparent symmetry is the architect’s conceit. The two wings are quite different in plan.

Learn about the dazzling discoveries coming out of the Alexander the Great-era tomb at Amphipolis in Greece.

A U-shaped platform, one of Mnesicles’s crucial innovations, draws together the central building and two western wings, ensuring that all three of these structures lie at the same elevation, even though the facades of the two wings are much smaller in scale than the facade of the central building. Indeed, the two wings and the central building of the Propylaea have virtually no common structural elements other than the platform. Each rises independently from that platform, and the small walls that connect each wing to the central building are structurally unnecessary. Yet when looking upon it from the west, the entire structure appears to be a fully unified whole.

There were to have been two other wings on the eastern side of the building, but neither was completed. The southern wing on the east side was apparently abandoned rather early in the building process, but the northern wing seemed to have been intended up to the moment construction stopped. Unlike the western wings, the eastern ones presented serious structural complications and truly novel problems to the architect, who could not have completed them as intended without significant changes to the central building and possibly the western wings.^d

What Mnesicles tried was daring because it was novel; it required a kind of conceptual thinking new to architects of antiquity who were accustomed to slow, evolutionary changes to intensely conservative forms. Whereas the Parthenon represents the culmination of the conservative temple form, the Propylaea represents the emergence of a more revolutionary approach to architectural forms. The essential vocabulary has not changed, but the concept here is new. It is the idea that a building can transcend its past. The complexity and the (false) symmetry are new, to be sure, but what is revolutionary is the idea that an architect can invent something truly new.

The delicate Temple of Athena Nike (the goddess Athena in her manifestation as Victory) is perched at the far western edge of the Propylaea’s southern wing. Each facade of this small temple has four Ionic columns (whereas the columns on the part of the wing just to the east [left, in the photo] of the temple are Doric). The temple precinct was originally surrounded by a balustrade set with relief carvings. Photo: Roger Wood/Corbis.

The Propylaea also shows us an architect working to push the limits of his materials. Mnesicles let iron bars into the tops of some beams so that the crossbeams above would rest on the iron bars rather than the marble beams; he even left room for the bars to give as weight bore down upon them. Although he lacked the analytic tools to determine the effect of the experiment (which, in fact, reduced the load-bearing capacity of the beams), he was attempting to go beyond his predecessors here as well.

The masons who worked on the Propylaea were almost certainly the same masons who had worked on the Parthenon, and they worked some of their magic here as well. The structure’s coffered ceilings, for example, made of wonderfully carved marble blocks painted blue with gold stars, were still impressive 600 years later when Pausanias declared them to be “down to the present day unrivalled.”

Both Ictinus and Mnesicles were firmly rooted in the Doric tradition, but both experimented with Ionic elements in the buildings they created. Ictinus used the more slender Ionic columns only in the opisthodomus (or western chamber) of the Parthenon. Mnesicles, on the other hand, brazenly used Doric for the exterior colonnades of the Propylaea and Ionic for the columns on either side of the passageway running down the middle of the central building. This design allowed for the Doric columns of the facade and the Ionic columns of the interior to be visible at the same moment—quite a revolutionary choice.

The delicate Temple of Athena Nike (the goddess Athena in her manifestation as Victory) is perched at the far western edge of the Propylaea’s southern wing. The temple precinct was originally surrounded by a balustrade set with relief carvings—including the one shown of Athena Nike fixing her sandal. Photo: Acropolis Museum, Athens/Bridgeman Art Library.

The smallest of the Acropolis structures, the Temple of Athena Nike, is a fully Ionic building. It stands at the westernmost reach of the precinct, above the natural bedrock and the earlier walls that had been sheathed in well-cut masonry as part of Pericles’s overall plan. In 1686 the Ottoman Turks completely demolished the building, salvaging its stone for the construction of fortifications. The temple has been reconstructed several times using blocks retrieved from that fortification, with each version attempting to correct errors made by previous builders. At the time of this writing, in fact, the temple is being reconstructed yet again.

The original Nike temple, completed about 425 B.C.E., did not have a fully enclosing colonnade. Instead, four columns graced each of the facades (east and west). In addition, the small site upon which the temple was built required that the porches behind those facade columns be relatively shallow. The balustrade that surrounded the precinct provided the setting for relief sculptures, including the famous depiction of the goddess Nike fixing her sandal, now in the Acropolis Museum. That figure epitomizes the small Nike temple—graceful, light, almost ethereal. If the Parthenon, constructed at the height of Athens’s economic and military power, symbolized the city’s grandeur and lofty ambitions, the diminutive Nike temple seems to foreshadow Athens’s narrower aspirations after the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.E.), the long conflict between Athens and Sparta chronicled so memorably by Thucydides.

An intriguing but complicated building, the Erechtheum, built in the last two decades of the fifth century B.C.E., was intended to house a variety of diverse cults, each with its own designated space. The principal entrance was through a facade with six Ionic columns on the structure’s eastern side (far right in the photo). The Erechtheum also had a north porch (far left in the photo) with an Ionic colonnade and a south porch with columns in the shape of beautiful maidens (the caryatids). Photo: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis.

The last of the structures on the Acropolis, the Erechtheum, was also built entirely in the Ionic style. By all odds, it should have been the first to be built, since it housed the Athenians’ most important image—the statue of Athena Polias, the city goddess. This primitive wooden image was said by Pausanias to have fallen from the sky. It was adorned with a new garment (peplos) every four years as part of the Greater Panathenaea, a celebration that was even more elaborate than the annual Lesser Panathenaea. Both festivals included religious ceremonies, but the Greater Panathenaea also included contests, both athletic and musical, as well as the great procession culminating in the presentation of the new peplos. However, the Erechtheum was not begun until about 420 B.C.E., and it was not finished until nearly the turn of the century, because work was halted during the later years of the Peloponnesian War.

Like the Propylaea, the Erechtheum lies on difficult terrain, falling sharply downhill to the north. The ritual activity inside the Erechtheum involved a variety of cults, and the building included sacred areas for Athena Polias, Erechtheus (a mythical king of Athens), Boutes (the mythical priest and brother of Erechtheus), the god Poseidon and Cecrops (another mythical king). The location of each of these areas was specified and had to be honored by the architect.

This article was originally published in Archaeology Odyssey. Every article ever published in that magazine, along with Biblical Archaeology Review and Bible Review is available in the online BAS Library.

As a result of the building’s many requirements, the Erechtheum is not an unqualified success. To a relatively simple—but two-leveled—rectangular building have been inelegantly grafted two porches that are on opposite sides of the core (north and south) but are not related to one another in terms of scale, style, elevation or position. The result is a much less unified structure than the Propylaea; the Erechtheum seems more of a pastiche than single creation. (Adding an unfortunate but necessary insult to this design, the modern restoration of the 1980s includes new, whiter blocks on the major walls of the building. The marble has already weathered and become less distinctly different; over time the difference will become less and less visible. In the meantime, however, the building looks strangely diseased. When the weathering has made the stones indistinguishable by color, surface treatment will still show clearly which blocks are new and which old.)

We don’t know who designed the Erechtheum, but lengthy inscriptions concerning the Erechtheum survive, partly because the work was stopped for a time and an inventory of its unfinished state was required. The inscriptions tell us that everyone who worked on the building—architect and mason, citizen and slave—received the same daily wage of one drachma. They also relate that about half the work force consisted of foreigners, and nearly as many of the Athenian workers were slaves as were citizens.

The major facade of the Erechtheum (the east facade) has six Ionic columns. The north porch has another Ionic colonnade. Above the walls ran a continuous sculpted frieze consisting of painted marble attached to a gray stone background. Only fragments remain today.

Elegant, graceful, serene, the caryatid columns of the eastern porch of the Erechtheum seem to move gently forward, as if stepping out into empty space. The Greek word “caryatid” means “women of Karyai” (Karyai is another name for Laconia, the region of the Peloponnesus where Sparta is located). The five caryatids (of six, since one is missing) now on the structure are replicas; one of the original maidens was removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century, and the others are now in the Acropolis Museum. Photo: AP/Lefteris Pitarakis.

The south porch, facing the Parthenon, also features a colonnade—but the marble columns here assume the shape of maidens, the beautiful caryatids.^e The caryatid porch has made the Erechtheum famous, and justly so. The graceful figures seem entirely comfortable with the weight bearing down on their heads. They stride forth gracefully, as if in procession, the three maidens on the viewer’s right advancing their right legs, the other three putting forth their left legs. These marble maidens give the building a sense of lithe elegance and delicacy.

The magnificently refined and sculptural Parthenon, the complex and innovative Propylaea, the enchanting caryatids of the Erechtheum and the small, graceful Nike Temple—these are what, together with the imposing hill on which they stand, have cast a spell over so many, not only scholars and antiquarians, but poets, artists and ordinary tourists. I first started working on the Acropolis in February of 1975, when people could wander about the Acropolis more or less as they wished. One day a French tourist wandered over to where I was working. He looked down into the area of the remains of the old entrance and saw, much to his surprise, a very cold archaeologist. We chatted briefly, and he told me that, having seen the Acropolis, he could now die in peace. I was young enough to be amused rather than moved, but the moment has stuck with me ever since.

The Acropolis is not just an imposing site with beautiful, battered buildings from the remote past. It is visible, tangible proof that we humans can create magnificent, enduring works of true genius.

Distinguishing Dorians from Ionians

Doric and Ionian architectural styles take their names from peoples who spoke different Greek dialects. The Dorians conquered most of mainland Greece by the end of the second millennium B.C.E. The Ionians inhabited the west coast of Anatolia, a region that came to be known as Ionia. After about 750 B.C.E., Ionian culture became very influential among Greek-speaking peoples. Throughout the East, in fact, the name “Yawani” (Ionian) became a generic term for “Greek.”

The simple, sturdy Doric architectural style, so impressively on display in the Parthenon, is characterized by 20-sided columns that have no base and rest right on the floor. Doric columns are topped by plain capitals and are spanned by an architrave composed of triglyphs (three vertical, grooved lines) and metopes (blank panels which were often painted or sculpted).

The more delicate Ionic columns rest on bases that look like a series of stacked rings. Their capitals are decorated with volutes (a spiral scroll design) and support an architrave that has a continuous frieze, rather than a pattern of triglyphs and metopes.

The Other Acropolis: Where People Really Worshiped

Photo: Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY.

Along with the Propylaea, the Parthenon, the Erechtheum and the Temple of Athena Nike, there were numerous shrines, fountains, altars and sanctuaries crowding the Acropolis.

The best known of those other monuments was probably the bronze statue of Athena called the Athena Promachos (Athena, Defender of the City). Although no trace of it remains today, the statue stood about 30 feet high on a pedestal in the open area just east of the Propylaea. Created by Phidias, the statue stood with its back to the wall supporting the terrace on which the Old Temple of Athena stood. The statue dates before 450 B.C.E., so the Old Temple of Athena would have been at least partially standing when it was first erected. According to Pausanias, sunlight reflecting from the bronze—and the added silver details—made the statue visible to sailors coming into Athens’s port of Piraeus.

One of the most important monuments on the Acropolis was the altar where the Athenians made sacrifices to Athena. The altar lay in the area east of the Erechtheum, though the only possible remains are places in the bedrock that have been smoothed. (Thucydides, who lived in the fifth century B.C.E., indicates that that the altar was very large; but Pausanias, who visited the Acropolis in the second century C.E., does not even mention it.) The altar was the true focal point of ancient worship. (In fact, people rarely entered temples, which were the homes of the gods/images and were often used as treasuries.)

Worship took place in the open air at the altar. There offerings were presented and burned so that the god received the smoke. The sacrificed animals were brought up to the Acropolis in processions that passed through the Propylaea—which helps to explain why the central passageway was actually a path on bedrock, with the floor and steps of the building lying on either side of this central path. Animals could thus walk to the Acropolis without climbing steps, and building materials could be transported more easily onto the sanctuary.

At the time of the Persian invasion, the Acropolis would have been full of sculptural offerings to the gods. Those offerings were damaged by the Persians, and they were then buried by the Athenians on the Acropolis so they would remain in a sacred area. As a result, we have a number of sculptures from the period before 480 B.C.E. that would otherwise have been removed. (The statue, which dates to 570–560 B.C.E., shows a youth carrying a calf to be sacrificed at the altar. The statue was dedicated to Athena Promachos by a man named Rhombos.) They provide not only beautiful examples of ancient art for those who visit the Acropolis Museum but also surprising examples of the extent to which ancient statues were sometimes painted (since burying the statues preserved some of the paint).

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The Acropolis was used from at least the Neolithic period on. During the Bronze Age it was a citadel, and parts of the surrounding walls were built at the end of the period, around 1200 B.C.E., to protect the city. All other remains from the Bronze Age were erased during the classical period or later.

Many changes also occurred after the classical period, though virtually all traces have been erased. Roman additions were common, of course. Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century C.E., the Parthenon, Erechtheum and Propylaea all became, at least in part, Christian religious structures. These structures were also used, and re-modified, during the time the Turks controlled Athens (1456–1832). Indeed, the Propylaea facade was even made into one wall of a fortified entrance courtyard, with the blocks from the Nike Temple used to fill in the spaces between columns.

Damage was also inflicted on the buildings in the course of the various battles for control of Athens. The most famous—and most damaging—incident occurred when the Venetian doge Francesco Morosini bombarded the Acropolis; in 1697 his canons exploded gunpowder stored by the Turks in the Parthenon.

The most recent major damage was done by Lord Elgin (1766–1841), who removed parts of the Parthenon—not only most of the frieze but also portions of the pedimental sculpture and one of the caryatids from the Erechtheum.

Since Greece achieved independence again in 1832 (when Athens was just a small village of a few thousand, though it became the capital within a year), the Acropolis has been the subject of nearly constant work to return it to its appearance during its heyday in the late fifth century B.C.E. Work continues on the Parthenon, the Propylaea and the Temple of Athena Nike, with a short pause for the Olympics, and will not be finished for some years.

“Antiquity’s High Holy Place” by Harrison Eiteljorg, II, originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 2004. It was first republished in Bible History Daily on April 25, 2014.

Notes:

a. Plutarch, the Roman historian, reports that Phidias had been advised by Pericles to make all the gold on the statue removable so that it could be weighed and accounted for, in the event the sculptor was accused of theft; indeed, such a charge was brought, so the plan was indeed well-advised.

b. Almost half of the frieze was removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century and placed in the British Museum in London. See Jacob Rothenberg, “Lord Elgin’s Marbles: How Sculptures from the Parthenon Got to the British Museum,” Archaeology Odyssey, Spring 1998.

c. By the time the Propylaea was constructed, the Acropolis itself was no longer fortified. After the Persians departed, walls were constructed to encompass much of Athens, not just the Acropolis.

d. The standard view is that the Propylaea was not finished because of the Peloponnesian War. I believe that construction was stopped because the northeast wing could not be built without modifications to the central building and the northwest wing.

e. The caryatids seen on the structure today are replicas. One of the originals was taken by Lord Elgin; the others have been removed to the Acropolis Museum.

1. Herodotus, Histories 8.53.

2. Herodotus, Histories 9.13.

3. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.89.3.

4. Pausanias, Attica 24.6-7.

The post The Athenian Acropolis appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Virtual Reality in Archaeology

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Wed, 09 May 2018 16:30:51 +0000

Wearing one of Lithodomos’s headsets, a visitor to Jerusalem’s Western Wall catches a glimpse of ancient Jerusalem. The use of virtual reality in archaeology can help tourists visualize how a site may have looked in antiquity. Photo: Lithodomos VR.

Have you ever found yourself gazing out at an archaeological ruin—usually having traveled thousands of miles to get there—and wondering: What exactly am I looking at? How would this have appeared in ancient times?

Few archaeological sites are straightforward to an observer. Thousands of years of erosion and subsequent construction often leave sites challenging to interpret. However, recently Virtual Reality (VR) technology has been helping visitors and students understand ancient sites.

Virtual Reality allows an individual to view a simulated 3D environment through a headset, as though they were physically there. The advantage of using virtual reality in archaeology is that tourists and students can first observe an archaeological site in person and then compare this view with a 3D representation of that site from the same perspective, but fully reconstructed. Understandably, many tourists have found this to be helpful in visualizing and interpreting the archaeological remains they are looking at.

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With a team of 3D modelers and archaeologists, Lithodomos—a company that creates VR tours of historical sites—has created virtual reconstructions from 10 countries, including sites like the Roman Colosseum, the Athenian Agora, and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. These 360° scenes, once downloaded as an app on a smartphone and viewed with a VR headset, can be used on site by tourists or remotely by individuals or classrooms.

In a tour of Jerusalem, this reconstructed scene of the city during the Roman period appears on viewers’ headsets—and on the Lithodomos app for smartphones. Photo: Lithodomos VR.

In addition to its educational uses, Simon Young, the CEO and co-founder of Lithodomos, sees VR as a possible alternative to physical reconstruction of ancient sites. Physical reconstruction is sometimes contested since the process often involves inauthentic materials and changes the original state of an archaeological discovery.¹

Visitors to Athens’s Acropolis step back in time—with Lithodomos’s headsets—to see the ruins as they would have appeared in ancient times. Photo: Lithodomos VR.

In spite of the benefits VR contributes to tourism, one of the primary concerns is that VR might distract from the actual archaeological site and defeat the purpose of visiting historical sites in person. However, according to Daniel A. Guttentag, director of the Office of Tourism Analysis at the College of Charleston, the potential of virtual reality in archaeology for constructive and appropriate use “will be determined by a tourist’s attitudes toward authenticity and his or her motivations and constraints.”²

And for those who desire to literally step into the past, this may be as close as you can get!

Abby VanderHart holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biblical Archaeology from Wheaton College and is on staff at the Tel Shimron Excavations.

Notes:

1. Simon Young, “Virtual Reality Brings the Past to Life,” Pursuit (blog), published on February 14, 2017.

2. Daniel A. Guttentag, “Virtual Reality: Applications and Implications for Tourism,” Tourism Management 31.5 (2010), pp. 637–351.

The Archaeology of Atheism in Ancient Athens

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 13:27:11 +0000

In this blog post, Prof. Tim Whitmarsh explores the evidence for the location of the Garden of Epicurus, arguing that its physical position was an expression of Epicureans’ “atheistic” views about death. Whitmarsh is the author of the recently published book Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (Knopf, 2015).—Ed.

The archaeology of atheism is not always easy. In the ancient Mediterranean world, atheism was an idea, rather than an ideology or an institution; it left few physical traces. The same may in fact be true today: the archaeologists of 4000 C.E. will find plenty of mosques, synagogues, churches and temples, but unless they happen on a miraculously preserved copy of The God Delusion, or the relics of the headquarters of the Secular Coalition for America (complete with entrance plaque), nothing in the material-cultural record will tell them about the role of atheism in society.

Marble portrait of Epicurus, now on display at the British Museum. Photo: Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

But as so often, if we change the angle of vision a little, then things begin to sharpen up in new ways. In this brief piece I want to try to locate Epicurus’s Garden in ancient Athens, not just geographically, but also symbolically. What did it matter where the Garden was? And did that position have anything to do with his ideas about religion?

Epicureans, though often called atheists (atheoi) by their contemporaries, were not quite atheists in our terms. Epicurus, who came to Athens from the island of Samos in the late fourth century B.C.E., was absolutely insistent that you would have to be “mad” to propose a philosophical system without gods. In the eyes of many, however, that was exactly what he did. He was a radical physicalist who thought there is nothing in nature that is not either matter or void. He taught that death is the end of us; after that we dissolve into atoms that will afterward be reconstituted in other forms. The gods are also made of matter and void, and they exist outside our world, having no constructive influence on it. Prayer, ritual and god-fearing have no effect on anything (except perhaps upon the person enacting them). These were the reasons why people associated the Epicureans with atheism (a more flexible term in antiquity than it is now).

The hub of Epicureanism was his famous “Garden.” The Garden was not really a “school” like Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum: it was more a physical manifestation of the ideal of tranquil serenity at which his philosophy aimed, devoted both to enabling friendship between people of all backgrounds (including some women and slaves), and to the commemoration of Epicurus himself. For most in antiquity, this place embodied Epicureanism more than anywhere else on earth.

We don’t know exactly where the Garden lay, but we do know along which stretch of road it was located. The Roman thinker and politician Cicero, writing in the first half of the first century B.C.E., mentions passing it on a stroll from the Dipylon to Plato’s Academy. The Dipylon was a huge, fortified gate in the north-west corner of the massive city walls built in the 470s (in the aftermath of the Persian invasions).

Plato’s school was attached to, and got its name from, one of the city’s three main gymnasia. The Academy lay about a mile outside of the city walls, as one traveled northwest along the road known as the Dromos. This is roughly the route of modern Plateon Street (nothing to do with Plato), which then becomes Monastiriou. Inside the city walls, in the other direction, the Dromos led to the Agora, Athens’ commercial and civic district (a point to which I’ll return at the end).

The Dipylon. Photo: Tim Whitmarsh.

Map of ancient Athens.

Some modern Athenians believe the site of the Garden was at the point where the Leoforos Athinon (“Athens Highway”) crosses the ancient Dromos, via a monstrous overpass. That is as may be. There is, pleasingly, a little park there, but it’s unlikely nowadays to stir Epicurean feelings of tranquility.

The Leoforos Athinon overpass. Photo: Tim Whitmarsh.

But the precise location doesn’t matter much. What is important is that we can now begin to think about the significance of the location in terms of its wider coordinates in the ancient city. Space is not just physical: it has emotional and cognitive associations too, and these matter deeply to its “users.” Let’s try to reconstruct the “journey of the imagination” that might have been taken by an ancient visitor to the Epicurean Garden, walking out through the Dipylon and along the Dromos.

The most important point is that this was a world of the dead. The Ceramic Quarter (Kerameikos), where the Dipylon was located, was not just an attractive residential district, but also the city’s burial ground; many of the graves have been excavated (the €8 entry fee for the archaeological site is money well spent). But in fact the tombs were not limited to the Dipylon area; they lined the full mile-long stretch of the Dromos. The ancient road is now largely buried beneath the residential district of modern Colonus, but what archaeology remains confirms the report of the ancient travel-writer Pausanias, that the entire length of the road was “full of sanctuaries of the gods, and graves of heroes and of men” (1.29). At any point on that road, then, most of your companions were buried. What does this mean for visitors to the Epicurean Garden?

To answer this question, we have to think first about Plato’s Academy. Visitors to the Garden will surely have known that the city’s most famous philosophical school lay at the end of the Dromos; the position of the Garden earlier on the road might be read as a symbolic attempt to “hijack” the Platonic topography. The Academy was founded in the 380s, some 80 years earlier than the Garden. For Plato, the soul was more important than the body; in fact, the aim of the philosophical life was to shuck off the constraints of the material body (its appetites and desires) and focus instead on that spark of divine fire that animates us. Death actually liberates the soul from the clogging body, releasing it into a state of greater philosophical purity. The location of the Academy at the end of the Dromos, then, became a metaphor for transcendence of the material body. Death is not the end, but the route to true philosophy.

Buildings to the east of the Academy gymnasium: perhaps Plato’s school? Photo: Tim Whitmarsh.

Death played a major, but very different, role in Epicurean philosophy. One of his central tenets is that the constituent parts of everything are matter and void. There is no spirit, and so no survival after death—and, just as importantly, no possibility of judgment in the afterlife. For Epicureans this was a great source of comfort. This life is the only one we have, so there is no need to worry about pleasing or appeasing gods. That the Garden was located in a space thick with material relics of the fragility of human life is surely no accident. Unlike the Academy—indeed, standing in direct competition with it—the Garden fostered, in its position as well as its tenets, the idea that nothing survives death except material relics themselves.

If the journey to the Garden offered itself as a symbolic narrative of any kind, it expressed a journey away from the stressful concerns of city life, embodied in the Agora, the commercial and administrative center of the city that marked the start of the Dromos. Epicurus’s own house was in the Melite region, south of the Agora (and marked on the map above). His own daily commute to work would have taken him past buyers and sellers squabbling over wares and prices, and civic officials lecturing about rules and regulations. The route along the Dromos would have seen these melt away into the world of tombs. That, for Epicurus, was the true meaning of tranquillity: leaving behind the petty concerns of civic life, and accepting the materiality and mortality of the human frame.

Tim Whitmarsh is the A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He works on all areas of Greek literature and culture, specializing particularly in the world of the Greeks under the Roman Empire. He is the author of Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (Knopf, 2015).

D.C.-Area Archaeology Event: Six Degrees of Pericles

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Mon, 16 May 2016 13:28:02 +0000

On Sunday, May 22, 2016, Dr. Diane Cline, Associate Professor of History and Classics at the George Washington University, will deliver the lecture “Six Degrees of Pericles: Social Networks in Classical Athens” in the Washington, D.C. area. The event is hosted by the Biblical Archaeology Society of Northern Virginia (BASONOVA) and Biblical Archaeology Forum (BAF).

Around 450 B.C.E., a small town on a remote peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean Sea was the loci of innovation, higher education, discovery, and invention. We don’t usually think of Athens in such terms, but with only perhaps 20,000 male citizens, it produced lasting works of literature, philosophy, architecture and fine arts that have had more impact on the evolution of Western Civilization than any other culture before or since.

What factors in ancient Greek society, and in Athens specifically, made it so open to creative people and their new ideas? How did their version of democracy provide a nurturing platform for innovations to develop and spread? In this illustrated lecture, we view the social fabric of classical Athens by using a research method called Social Network Analysis, which makes visible that which is usually invisible. By studying social relationships between Athenians as nodes and links in a network, we can see how the structure of Athenian society in the mid-fifth century B.C.E. enabled high creativity, productivity, innovation and an unparalleled legacy.

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Curtains Rise at the Theater of Messene after 1,700-Year Intermission

Noah Wiener — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:42:41 +0000

The restored theater at Messene. Photo: APE-MPE.

The seats of Messene’s grand theater in the southwestern Peloponnese have remained empty since 300 C.E. Long gone are the days when a general from the Achaean league or the king of Macedonia would host events with thousands of visitors. After 20 years of excavation and restoration, the theater will be reopened—as both an archaeological site and a contemporary cultural institution.

Excavation director Petros Themelis told the Greek publication Αρχαιολογìα Online, “We want the theater to operate for events, schools, conferences. We want all areas of ancient Messene to operate in a multifaceted manner. We want the whole city to become alive, to be related to society and the institutions.”

The original third-century-B.C.E. theater, which could have hosted up to 10,000 spectators, served as a model for later monumental performance spaces across the Roman world. After the theater fell out of use, entire rows of seats were removed for local construction projects, thousands of which were carefully reunited by archaeologists working on the restoration project. On August 3, the theater will host its inaugural event, featuring performances by the Athens State Orchestra.

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Stoa Poikile Excavations in the Athenian Agora

Noah Wiener — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:19:21 +0000

A reconstruction of the Stoa Poikile. From the Athenian Agora Excavations at http://www.agathe.gr/

The Stoa Poikile, or Painted Portico, was one of the major structures in Athens’ Classical Agora, the center of the city’s political and public life. While the Agora has been extensively excavated and visited over the past 80 years, the Athens-Piraeus railway runs through the north of the site, and the northernmost sections lie beneath the vibrant Monastiraki neighborhood. Recent land purchases and expropriations by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens will allow archaeologists to excavate the famous Stoa Poikile, one of the northernmost structures in the Agora. A bit of the Stoa Poikile was exposed during the 1981 excavation season, but the rest has been inaccessibly covered by modern buildings—until now.

The Stoa Poikile was built in the fifth century B.C.E. and quickly became a center for Athenian art where paintings by Mikon, Panainos, Polygnotos of Thasos and others were put on display. The traveling second-century C.E. geographer Pausanias provides us with extensive descriptions of the art displayed at the Stoa Poikile (see below).

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The eastern portion of the Athenian Agora. The renewed Stoa Poikile excavations will take place near the upper-left corner of this photograph.

In the early third century B.C.E., philosopher Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoic philosophy, used the Stoa Poikile to teach his students. The Stoics were named after their classroom—the Stoa Poikile. Centuries later, the philosophy taught in the Stoa Poikile came to life again in New Testament letters, though the extent to which Paul’s letters reflect his connection to the principles of Stoic philosophy has been a popular scholarly debate for centuries. The new excavations in the Athenian Agora will uncover the cradle of this school of thought.

Pausanias on the Stoa Poikile

Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.15.1-1.16.1. Translation by W. H. S. Jones from the Loeb Classical Library edition. Full text available online through the Tufts Perseus Digital Library.

As you go to the portico which they call painted, because of its pictures, there is a bronze statue of Hermes of the Market-place, and near it a gate. On it is a trophy erected by the Athenians, who in a cavalry action overcame Pleistarchus, to whose command his brother Cassander had entrusted his cavalry and mercenaries. This portico contains, first, the Athenians arrayed against the Lacedaemonians at Oenoe in the Argive territory. What is depicted is not the crisis of the battle nor when the action had advanced as far as the display of deeds of valor, but the beginning of the fight when the combatants were about to close.

The earliest-known Biblical painting features Greek philosophers set into a Biblical scene. Read “Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle” in Bible History Daily.

On the middle wall are the Athenians and Theseus fighting with the Amazons. So, it seems, only the women did not lose through their defeats their reckless courage in the face of danger; Themiscyra was taken by Heracles, and afterwards the army which they dispatched to Athens was destroyed, but nevertheless they came to Troy to fight all the Greeks as well as the Athenians them selves. After the Amazons come the Greeks when they have taken Troy, and the kings assembled on account of the outrage committed by Ajax against Cassandra. The picture includes Ajax himself, Cassandra and other captive women.

When Pausanias visited the Stoa Poikile in the second century C.E., he described the Spartan shields on display from the Athenian defeat of Sparta in the famous battle of Sphacteria. This shield, now housed in the Agora Museum in Athens, features an inscription reading: The Athenians, from the Lacedamonians (Spartans) at Pylos (an ancient city on the mainland near Sphacteria).

At the end of the painting are those who fought at Marathon; the Boeotians of Plataea and the Attic contingent are coming to blows with the foreigners. In this place neither side has the better, but the center of the fighting shows the foreigners in flight and pushing one another into the morass, while at the end of the painting are the Phoenician ships, and the Greeks killing the foreigners who are scrambling into them. Here is also a portrait of the hero Marathon, after whom the plain is named, of Theseus represented as coming up from the under-world, of Athena and of Heracles. The Marathonians, according to their own account, were the first to regard Heracles as a god. Of the fighters the most conspicuous figures in the painting are Callimachus, who had been elected commander-in-chief by the Athenians, Miltiades, one of the generals, and a hero called Echetlus, of whom I shall make mention later.Here are dedicated brazen shields, and some have an inscription that they are taken from the Scioneans and their allies, while others, smeared with pitch lest they should be worn by age and rust, are said to be those of the Lacedaemonians who were taken prisoners in the island of Sphacteria.

Here are placed bronze statues, one, in front of the portico, of Solon, who composed the laws for the Athenians, and, a little farther away, one of Seleucus, whose future prosperity was foreshadowed by unmistakable signs.

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The Golden Wreaths of the Thessaloniki Metro Excavations

Noah Wiener — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:00:00 +0000

This golden wreath was uncovered during the Thessaloniki metro excavations.

Last week, excavations for the construction of a new subway system in Thessaloniki uncovered a 2300-year-old golden olive branch wreath in a Macedonian cist tomb. Thessaloniki, the second-largest city in Greece, was founded in 315 B.C.E. by King Cassander of Macedon and named after his wife (the half-sister of Alexander the Great) Thessalonike. Thessaloniki developed an early Christian center, which later became the second wealthiest city in the Byzantine Empire. Excavations of the Thessalonian metro uncovered eight other Hellenistic golden wreaths in a unique female burial in 2008. As the city progresses forward with its new transportation system, its earliest antiquities are coming back to light.

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