Ancient Agora of Athens

The ground closest to the north-west side of the Acropolis was lived on and buried in long before it was a public space. Human activity there goes back to the Neolithic period, to around 3500 BC, and the graves found on the site held substantial offerings, chiefly pottery vessels. It was still a cemetery in Mycenaean times, when the city itself was growing to the south of the Acropolis, and many of its chamber tombs were ranged on either side of the road that would later become the Panathenaic Way. Through the Geometric period little happened there, and the area went by the name Kerameikos.

Around 600 BC Solon moved the administrative centre of Athens from the old agora west of the Acropolis, the so-called Agora of Theseus, to the Kerameikos, and Peisistratos then walled the city, dividing the district into an Inner Kerameikos that became the political centre and an Outer that stayed the burial ground. At the Leokoreion here, Hipparchos son of Peisistratos was murdered by Harmodios and Aristogeiton in 514 BC. The reforms of Kleisthenes that led to democracy demanded buildings for the new constitution's functions, among them the Bouleuterion of around 500 BC where the Council of Five Hundred sat, and the space left empty between them was shaped to take the gatherings of the citizens, with wooden stands for spectators; it is thought very likely that the first tragedies of Aeschylus were presented there rather than on the ground south of the Acropolis. All of it went down with the rest of the city when the Persians under the general Mardonios invaded Athens in 479 BC.

Reconstruction was quick. The Royal Stoa went up almost at once after the Persian destruction, in 479 BC; it was the seat of the Archon Basileus, the tablets bearing Athens's most important laws were kept in it, and the preliminary examination of Socrates was held there before his execution in 399 BC. The Painted Stoa of 460 BC was the most celebrated stoa in Athens, and Zeno of Kition was teaching in it around 300 BC when he founded Stoic philosophy. Under Pericles the square filled with monumental building: work on the Temple of Hephaestus, the best preserved of Greek temples, ran from 449 to 444 BC, and the round Tholos of 465 BC housed the prytaneis of the Council, kept the state's official weights and measures and held beds so that officials could stay the night.

In the fifth and fourth centuries BC there is significant evidence of women working in the agora as innkeepers and as merchants selling their own goods: fruit, clothes, pottery, religious and luxury wares, perfume, incense, purple dye, wreaths and ribbons. Several of the religious festivals of the Athenian calendar were held there, and they gave the women of the city an occasion to be out of the house; some were performed by women, whose duties included officiating at the worship of Athena, a service required of the daughters of aristocratic families. Women of every rank made offerings at the small shrines in the square, and some set up substantial memorials to their piety.

Marble-workers were at work from early in the fifth century, their earliest workshops in the residential and industrial districts to the south-west, and generations of them made the agora a centre of marble sculpture production, turning out weights, sundials, furniture parts and kitchen utensils alongside statuary. The sculptors attested there include Phidias and his associate Alkamenes, who made the bronze cult statues of Hephaestus and Athena for the Temple of Hephaestus, and, in the fourth century, Praxiteles, Bryaxis and Euphranor.

In the Hellenistic period the appearance of the agora changed radically, as the rulers of the Greek kingdoms paid for monuments in Athens: Attalos II of Pergamon, whose reign ran from 159 to 138 BC, gave the city the two-storey stoa that bears his name, a gift the surviving inscription attests, and around 150 BC the Old Bouleuterion was demolished and the Metroon raised in its place to house the state archives. Then, in 86 BC, after a long siege, the Roman general Sulla broke into Athens and sacked it. Many of the agora's monuments were badly damaged, mostly by the shot of the Roman catapults, and South Stoa II and the Aiakeion were destroyed outright. The ruined South Square drew the marble-workers, who were attracted to the remains of the marble temples and set up their workshops among them.

After Sulla's destruction the Athenians, helped by a succession of Roman emperors and officials, gave the agora its final and most splendid form. South Stoa II was pulled down and its site worked for years as a quarry of ready-cut material. The centre of the square was taken by the bulk of the Odeon of Agrippa, built in 15 BC by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, son-in-law and general of Octavian Augustus, where musical contests were held and foreign philosophers visiting Athens were in the habit of teaching; around AD 150 its roof came down, and when the building was raised again an internal wall put in for safety cut the audience, in a hall that had held as many as a thousand, to five hundred. Augustus built the new commercial centre of the city a little to the east, the Roman Agora, with money of his uncle Julius Caesar, which left the old square as a political and cultural centre alone. Titus Flavius Pantainos built a library south of the Stoa of Attalos in AD 100, most of its books the gift of Pantainos and his children, and there is evidence of a synagogue in the agora in the third century.

That prosperity held until AD 267, when the Heruli invaded and destroyed the whole city. The monuments of the agora were levelled, all except the Temple of Hephaestus, which took remarkably little damage. Athens shrank sharply, and a much smaller wall was built that left the agora outside it, the eastern wall of the ruined Stoa of Attalos serving as its western leg, while the remains of the Odeon and of the south stoas were turned into a complex of gymnasia and baths. In 384 Theodosius I ordered the philosophical schools and the ancient sanctuaries to stop functioning, and many temples in Athens changed use: the Temple of Hephaestus became the church of Saint George.

Slav raiders came in 580, and after them the site was finally abandoned. It is reported to have been settled again in the tenth century, and around the year 1000 the church of the Holy Apostles of Solakis was built at the south-eastern edge of the square. A fresh destruction followed in 1204 at the hands of Leon Sgouros, then ruler of Nauplion, and the ground was deserted once more. After the Ottoman capture of Athens in 1456 the city spread back over the agora and filled it with houses and churches, though the line of the Panathenaic Way was kept through all of it. The last destruction came with the surrounding district during the Greek revolution, in the years 1826 and 1827, and the nineteenth century found the ancient agora buried under the densely built modern city that received King Otho when Athens was proclaimed capital of the new kingdom in 1834.

Between 1851 and 1852 the Archaeological Society of Athens dug in the Vrysaki neighbourhood, later identified as the area of the agora, in the courtyard of the Psoma House owned by Louisa Psoma, meaning to uncover the Bouleuterion, the Metroon and the Tholos; the society sold shares in the National Bank of Greece worth 12,000 drachmas to buy the plot. Pittakis led the excavation, which produced a number of ancient inscriptions but none of the promised monuments, and in 1910 the archaeologist Konstantinos Kouroniotis found that the antiquities from the house belonged to the late Roman walls of the city. Wilhelm Dörpfeld, director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens, dug on the western slope of the Acropolis and on the Areopagus from 1882 to 1888 with the same object. An arson fire on 9 August 1884 destroyed a large part of the small shops and houses then covering the ground, which gave the archaeologists their opening to begin work at the Roman Agora and the Library of Hadrian.

A bill for the expropriation of the properties of Vrysaki was put to the Hellenic Parliament in 1924 and defeated; it became clear that only the foreign archaeological institutes could raise capital on that scale, and of those only the American School of Classical Studies at Athens took an interest. In 1930 the school appointed T. Leslie Shear, then directing its work at Corinth, to lead the dig, and since Rhys Carpenter was never appointed as general director over him, Shear had total control. The work was largely funded by the financier John D. Rockefeller Jr and required an entire quarter of the city to be expropriated and demolished; Shear had Vrysaki photographed before its demolition, and his wife, Josephine Platner Shear, supervised the digging and led the study and conservation of the coins from the site.

Digging began on 25 May, east of the Temple of Hephaestus. The first season, in 1931, was minor exploratory work only, but six months of work in 1932 uncovered the Royal Stoa, the agora's Great Drain and the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios, and the Tholos, the Temple of Apollo Patroos and the Altar of the Twelve Gods followed between January and May 1934. By the close of the 1935 season about half the site had been cleared, the finds running to almost 600 pieces of sculpture, more than 6,000 pieces of pottery and more than 41,000 coins; the 1936 season found the Odeon of Agrippa and a shield taken as plunder after the Battle of Pylos in 425 BC, and in 1938 the course of the Panathenaic Way was plotted, which established the full boundaries of the agora. In the 1939 campaign 56,000 tons of earth were cleared, more than in any other year. During a five-week season in 1940 the excavation was prepared for the Second World War: the finds were handed to the Greek government, and the records were photographed and placed in a bomb-proof shelter.

Systematic work resumed from 1946 to 1960, again in 1969, and from 1980 onwards. The Stoa of Attalos was fully restored between 1953 and 1956 to house the Museum of the Ancient Agora, and the church of the Holy Apostles was renovated by the same date. A lead tablet found in 1974 proved to be a letter written by a slave named Lesis, one of the few recorded instances of slave literacy. Digging in the 1980s moved north above Hadrian Street, where the western end of the Painted Stoa was located, and three buildings at the corner of Adrianou and Agiou Filippou were demolished in 2006 and 2007 to reveal its eastern end. The archaeological site has been open since 1957 and is supervised by the Greek Archaeological Service under the Ministry of Culture, and the museum in the Stoa of Attalos, whose exhibits are tied to Athenian democracy, added an exhibition of sculpted portraits from the excavations in 2012. John McK. Camp directed the excavations from 1994 until his retirement in 2022, and John K. Papadopoulos holds the post after him.