The Acropolis As We Know It Today Never Existed

It was during this period that Pericles, one of Ancient Athens’ most prominent leaders, came to the fore and ordered a large-scale building program on the Acropolis. During the conflicts with Persia, Athens suffered much being both besieged and sacked by the Persian army around 479-480 BCE. The result of this sacking was large-scale destruction across the city, including the demolition of the contemporaneous Acropolis which by then had multiple temples dedicated to the city’s patron goddess, Athena, and a monumental gateway and encircling walls. In light of this destruction, Pericles sought to reassert Athens’ primacy amongst the Greeks and reinvigorate the city’s identity by ordering Athena’s temples and other structures rebuilt in grand measure. 

Though the construction ordered by Pericles extended beyond his own tenure in power, the end result was the magnificent coalescence of the Parthenon, the Erectheion, the Propylaea, the Temple of Athena Polias, the Temple of Athena Nike, and multiple other sanctuaries and shrines. 

These buildings and their statuary were lauded across the ancient world for their elegance, beauty, and architectural ingenuity with famous ancient authors writing about them even centuries later. Yet, like any human creation, these were not immortal or unending creations. Archaeological evidence has shown that repair work, reconstructions, and new constructions have taken place on the acropolis nearly constantly since the Classical period, with not every monument surviving as it once was or surviving at all thanks to the ravages of time, nature, and humanity. The Parthenon, Erectheion, and Propylaea have all left substantial enough evidence of their presence for modern reconstructions, however, other features of the Classical Acropolis such as the sanctuary of Zeus Polieus, Athena’s altar, or the Pandroseion have left us little to no evidence beyond what we can reconstruct from ancient sources and images from elsewhere (often coins). 

What is more, the changing nature of human society wrought innumerable transformations upon this space across time. Under the Roman Empire, new temples to the deified imperial family were constructed on the Acropolis (none of which left substantial evidence), while later under the Byzantine and Ottoman periods the old pagan temples that survived were adapted for new modes of worship. The Parthenon, for instance, was converted to a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary during the Byzantine period, and under the Ottomans, it was again repurposed as a mosque complete with a minaret tower. Other surviving temples were similarly altered to accommodate churches, administrative uses, or to home the city’s elite and ruling individuals.

The 19th century would again see large-scale changes in the Acropolis in the aftermath of the Greek War of Independence between 1821 and 1829. Riding upon the waves of independence and nationalism, plans to “restore” the Acropolis to its former Greek glory were enacted and all traces of the post-Classical Acropolis were swept away. Work conducted during this and the next century aimed to continue this pursuit and promote Athens’ glorious ancient past.

It was not until the 1970s that academic excavations on the Acropolis sought to rectify the earlier reconstructions and correct those errors that could be rectified. While lost or destroyed evidence could not be recovered, archaeologists have since been working to systematically record all aspects of the Acropolis’ history as well as alter incorrect restorations such as the placement of certain monuments or the re-alignment of columns previously placed together wrongly. 

Despite modern attempts to right past wrongs, it still stands that the Acropolis we know today is a fictive and constructed image of an Athens that did not exist as we have recreated it. Fragmentary natures of the buildings notwithstanding, the reconstructions in Athens still heavily focus on recreating and preserving the Classical renditions of the buildings atop it. The history that followed is now better acknowledged but like any archaeological site, it does well to remember that we are not necessarily looking at the past as much as we are looking at someone else’s version of it.