Temple of Olympian Zeus

Listen first. Traffic hums along the avenue behind you, but here the sound softens. Gravel crunches underfoot. Pine needles and dry grass give off a warm, dusty smell in the sun. In front of you rise a cluster of enormous columns, pale gold and grey, with nothing above them but sky. They look almost too tall for the empty ground around them. That feeling is correct. You are standing in the footprint of one of the largest temples ever built in ancient Greece.

This is the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which Athenians also call the Olympieion. It was dedicated to Zeus, king of the gods, who ruled from Mount Olympus. The temple has a strange story. Its construction stretched across roughly six or seven centuries. Kings, tyrants and emperors each tried to finish it. Several of them failed. When it was finally complete, it stood for only a relatively short time before decline set in.

The story begins in the sixth century before Christ. At that time Athens was ruled by the Peisistratids, a family of tyrants. In ancient Greece, a tyrant simply meant a ruler who took power outside the normal rules. The Peisistratids planned a temple big enough to rival the great temples of the eastern Aegean. Workers laid foundations and began on the columns. Then, around 510 BC, the tyranny collapsed. The project stopped, and the half-built temple sat abandoned for centuries.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Later, the philosopher Aristotle mentioned this temple in his writings on politics. He offered it as an example of how tyrants kept their people busy and poor with enormous building works. So, even in the ancient world, this unfinished site carried a political message. For the new democracy of Athens, a giant temple left unfinished may have been better than a monument to the men they had removed.

The next attempt came from an unexpected direction. In the second century before Christ, a foreign king paid for the work. He was Antiochus the Fourth, ruler of the Seleucid empire, a Greek-speaking kingdom based in what is now Syria. He hired a Roman architect named Cossutius. The design changed at this point. Cossutius chose the Corinthian style, with column tops carved like bundles of acanthus leaves. Then Antiochus died, and once again the building stopped.

Now comes a second surprise. In the first century before Christ, the Roman general Sulla captured Athens. According to ancient writers, he took some columns or column parts from this unfinished temple and shipped them to Rome. They were used in the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. So, pieces of this place may have travelled across the sea to decorate the capital of a new empire. The Athenian temple, meanwhile, still waited.

The man who finally finished it was the Roman emperor Hadrian, in the second century after Christ. Hadrian loved Greek culture and spent long periods in Athens. He completed the temple and dedicated it around 131 or 132. Inside stood a colossal statue of Zeus, made of gold and ivory over a wooden frame. Ancient sources also say a large statue of Hadrian himself stood here. The Athenians honoured him with many statues in the sacred enclosure around the building.

Take a moment to picture the full temple. It once had 104 columns, arranged in double and triple rows around the inner hall. Each column rose about seventeen metres, roughly the height of a five-storey building. The marble came from Mount Pentelicus, a mountain northeast of Athens, the same source used for the Parthenon. Look at the surface of the stone. Where it has weathered, Pentelic marble turns a soft honey colour because of the iron in it.

Today, only about fifteen columns still stand. Most of the rest disappeared long ago. After invasions in the third century, Athens shrank and the temple fell into ruin. Over the following centuries, people treated the site as a quarry. They cut and carried away the marble for new buildings, and some was burned to make lime for mortar. This was common across the ancient world. Great monuments slowly became the raw material for ordinary houses and churches.

Now look along the ground near the standing group. You will see one column lying on its side, broken into its separate drums, like a stack of coins knocked over. This column stood until 1852, when a powerful storm brought it down. It was never raised again. Walk close to it. You can see how each drum was cut separately and fitted together. You can also see the scale of the column far better than from a distance.

There is also a curious tale linked to the top of these columns. According to accounts from the medieval period, a Christian hermit lived up on the stone beam across two of the columns. Such hermits, called stylites, chose to live on high pillars as an act of devotion. Some older travellers' drawings show a small structure on top. The details are uncertain, so treat it as a story passed down rather than firm history. Still, look up and imagine living there.

Near the entrance to the site, by the busy avenue, stands Hadrian's Arch. This marble gateway was built around the same time Hadrian completed the temple. It carries two inscriptions, one on each side. One side refers to the old city of Theseus, the legendary hero of Athens. The other side refers to the city of Hadrian. Many people read this as a line between the ancient town and the new Roman quarter. It is worth walking through after your visit.

From inside the site, turn toward the northwest. You will see the Acropolis on its rocky hill, with the Parthenon at the top. The two monuments face each other across a short distance. One was built in a single generation at the height of Athenian power. The other took centuries and many rulers to complete. Behind you, the trees of the National Garden and the grounds of the Zappeion give this corner of the city a calmer feeling.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment between the columns and the open ground. Notice how the light moves across the fluting, the long vertical grooves cut into each shaft. Notice the sound of the city returning as you walk toward the gate. Many hands shaped this place over many centuries, and many others took it apart. What remains is enough to show its size. As you walk away, look back once more at those columns against the sky.