 ntering
the Ancient Agora (the marketplace) of Athens and
seeing a maze of rubble dotting the large area of
excavations, a visitor is reminded of the transitory
nature of human endeavors. A center of
political, social, and commercial life of Athens
from 600 B.C., the Agora was literally packed with
temples, altars, free standing statues, schools,
shops, libraries, fountain houses, as well as dance
and concert halls. It had a council chamber, a
gymnasium, a mint, an arsenal, and even a prison
(where Socrates drank his hemlock in 399 B.C.). When
the Athenians ran out of real estate, they started
developing the adjacent area -- known today as the Roman Agora. Today,
one needs a good plan, a three-dimensional
reconstruction of the site, or a good imagination,
to make sense of the remaining fragments of the
ancient marketplace, excavated by the American
School of Classical Studies in 1931-41 and
1946-60. Between 1953 and 1956, the School
rebuilt one of the ancient stoas, the Stoa of
Attalos, converting it into the Agora Museum. The museum
was established to preserve the most important
archeological finds; very few objects were
left outside. From the once-impressive Odeion of
Agrippa, built between 20 B.C. and 2 A.D., only a
few statues remain (ill. 1, 3). On the ruins
of the ancient nymphaion, the Byzantines erected in
the 11th century the church of the Holy Apostles
(ill. 4-6). Besides the reconstructed Stoa of
Attalos, the most impressive (and the best
preserved) building in the Agora is the Hephaisteion,
the temple dedicated to Hephaistos and Athena (ill.
2). Probably designed by the same architect who
built the temple of Poseidon at Sounio, the Hephaisteion was
built in two stages: the work started before 449,
but it was finished only after Pericles' death,
between 421 and 415 B.C. In the 5th century
A.D., the temple was converted into a Christian church, known from the 14th century as the church of St. George. This saved it
from destruction. Because of the topic of its
sculpted frieze (the story of Theseus), the
Hephaisteion has been often called the Theseion.
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