A little farther east stands a great gate or portico, consisting of four Doric columns, 26 feet high, with a massive architrave and pediment. An inscription on the architrave tells that it was erected in honour of Athena Archegetis (“Foundress Athena”) by the people of Athens, from funds bestowed on them by Julius Cæsar and the Emperor Augustus. It was once supposed to be part of a temple, but excavations have proved that it led into a great market-place, which was surrounded by an Ionic colonnade, and was chiefly used (judging from an inscription found in the neighbourhood) for the sale of olive-oil, the great gift of Athena. In the pediment of the gate there was originally a statue of Lucius, the adopted son of Augustus. His son-in-law Agrippa was also held in honour in Athens; and on the Acropolis a pedestal can still be seen, close to the Propylæa, on which his statue rested, with an inscription in which he is styled a benefactor of the city.
On the Museum or Observatory Hill there is a marble structure called the Monument of Philopappus, erected in the beginning of the second century A.D., in honour of a generous Athenian citizen of that name, who was the last hereditary king of Commagene, in Asia Minor. Above the frieze are three niches, two of which contain statues of Philopappus and his grandfather Antiochus Epiphanes, while in the third, on the right, there once stood the figure of Seleucus Nicator, the founder of the dynasty. On the north-east side of the hill there are three rock-hewn chambers, no doubt originally tombs, though they are now called (apparently without any justification) the Prison of Socrates.
Among all the Roman emperors Hadrian was the
The entrance to the market-place, built in the time of Augustus. On the side of the cliff of the Acropolis we see the caves of Pan and Apollo beneath the north wing of the Propylæa.
greatest admirer of Athens, and conferred most benefits on the city, both in the way of architectural adornment and otherwise. He erected a number of magnificent buildings in the heart of the city, one of which (as Pausanias tells us) had a hundred columns of Phrygian marble, another a hundred columns of Libyan marble, while a third, which was used as a library, was adorned with a gilded roof and alabaster. Part of a rich colonnade has been preserved, and is known as the Stoa of Hadrian. But the emperor’s greatest monument was the Olympieum, or temple of Olympian Zeus, situated to the south-east of the Acropolis, on the right bank of the Ilissus. The foundation of the temple had been laid by Peisistratus nearly 700 years before, and the work had been considerably advanced by Antiochus Epiphanes nearly 400 years later; but it was reserved to Hadrian to complete the great undertaking, which he did in a munificent style. Unfortunately only fifteen of the hundred or more Corinthian columns of Pentelic marble are now standing, occupying but a small part of the vast platform (about 2200 feet in circumference) on which the temple stood. But such is the grandeur of the columns, rising to a height of nearly 57 feet and fully 5½ feet in diameter, that they form one of the most imposing ruins in the world. Even before the commencement of the temple of Peisistratus, the place was regarded with peculiar veneration as the traditional site of a temple erected by Deucalion, the survivor of the Flood; and in the days of Pausanias a cleft was to be seen in the ground, into which the subsiding waters were said to have sunk, and where, every year, the people cast in wheaten meal kneaded with honey, probably in memory of those who perished in the Deluge.