Choragic Monument of Lysicrates

Listen for a moment. Scooters hum down the narrow lanes of Plaka. Cutlery clinks at the café tables nearby. Somewhere a cat drops off a wall. In the middle of all this sits a small, round marble shrine on a tall square base. It is pale, slightly honey-coloured, and worn smooth at the edges. Most people walk past it on the way to dinner. Yet you are standing in front of one of the most copied little buildings in the history of architecture.

This is the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. It went up in the second half of the fourth century before Christ, around 335 BCE. That makes it older than almost everything else you can still touch in this part of the city. The Acropolis rises just behind you to the west, but its great temples were already about a century old when this monument was new. Here, the Athens of Alexander the Great's lifetime is still standing at street level.

Why build it at all? The answer is theatre. Every year, Athens held a great festival for Dionysus, the god of wine and drama. Choruses of men and boys competed in song and dance. Each chorus needed a sponsor, a wealthy citizen called a choregos, who paid for the training and the costumes. It was a public duty, and an expensive one. It was also a chance to win glory in front of the whole city.

The winning sponsor received a bronze tripod, a three-legged ceremonial vessel. And he was expected to show it off. So rich Athenians built small monuments to hold their tripods, and they lined them up along one road. That road ran from the theatre of Dionysus, below the Acropolis, around towards the old marketplace. Its name was the Street of the Tripods. The modern lane beside you, Tripodon Street, still follows much of that ancient route.

Once, dozens of these trophy monuments stood here, one after another. Imagine a whole avenue of bronze prizes catching the sun. Today, this is the only one that survives intact. The others vanished long ago, broken up, buried, or melted down. So when you look at Lysicrates' monument, you are looking at the last survivor of an entire street of ancient boasting.

Look up at the band of stone just below the roof. There is an inscription there, carved in Greek letters. It tells us that Lysicrates, son of Lysitheides, was the sponsor. His tribe won with a chorus of boys. It names the musician who played the aulos, a double reed pipe, and the man who trained the singers. It even names the official of the year. In a few short lines, it is a complete record of one winning night.

Now look at the columns. There are six of them, set into the curved wall of the drum. Their tops are carved with deep, curling acanthus leaves. This is the Corinthian style, the most ornate of the classical Greek orders. Here is the first surprise. This monument is the earliest known building where Corinthian columns were used on the outside. Before this, Greek builders had kept them mostly for interiors. Every leafy column on a bank, a museum, or a capitol building traces back to experiments like this.

Above the columns runs a narrow carved frieze. It is weathered, so take your time. The scene comes from an old Greek myth about Dionysus. Pirates captured the young god, not knowing who he was. He took his revenge by turning them into dolphins. If you look closely, you may make out figures leaping and twisting, half human and half sea creature. It was a fitting story for a monument to theatre and to the god of transformation.

The roof is another small marvel. It is carved from a single block of marble, shaped like a shallow dome covered in leaves. At the very top, a carved floral ornament rises up. That was the stand for the bronze tripod. The tripod itself is long gone. Try to picture it there, gleaming, the actual prize, raised above the street for everyone to see.

Here is the second surprise. In the seventeenth century, Capuchin friars, a French Catholic order, acquired the site and built their monastery around it. The little monument ended up inside their walls, used for a time as a reading room. By then, locals had a different name for it — the Lantern of Demosthenes. Legend has it that the great orator shut himself inside to practise his speeches. There is no evidence for this. Demosthenes lived in the same century, but the tale belongs to folklore, not history.

The monastery also hosted a famous guest. The English poet Lord Byron stayed with the friars during his first visit to Athens, in the early nineteenth century. He wrote and wandered here, in a much quieter Plaka than the one around you now. Then, during the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, the monastery burned. The monument survived, damaged but standing. It was cleared and restored in the later nineteenth century, with French support.

Its influence travelled far beyond Athens. In the eighteenth century, the British architects James Stuart and Nicholas Revett measured and drew it carefully. Their published drawings spread across Europe and America. Soon, versions of this monument appeared everywhere. You can find its echo on a hilltop in Edinburgh, on top of a historic exchange building in Philadelphia, and in parks and gardens around the world. A trophy for a boys' choir became a model for the neoclassical age.

Before you move on, walk slowly all the way around it. Notice how the square base is rougher and darker than the marble above. Notice the light sliding across the curve of the drum. Then look past it, up towards the rock of the Acropolis. Twenty-four centuries ago, someone stood here after a long night of singing and applause. The cafés and scooters are new. The pride in a good performance is not.