Acropolis of Athens: The Sacred Rock From Bronze Age to Pericles

The Acropolis of Athens is a flat-topped limestone hill in the centre of Athens that served as a Bronze Age fortress and then, for more than a thousand years, as the main sanctuary of the goddess Athena. After the Persians burned it in 480 BC, the Athenians under Pericles rebuilt it from 447 BC with the Parthenon, the Propylaia, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. These buildings became the most influential monuments of classical Greece and a lasting symbol of Western architecture and democracy.

The rock and its earliest history

The Acropolis rises about 70 metres above the surrounding city, to roughly 156 metres above sea level. Its summit is a plateau of about 3 hectares, bounded by steep cliffs on all sides except the west, where a slope gives natural access. Springs at the foot of the rock and caves in its sides made it attractive from very early times.

Pottery and traces of houses show that people lived on and around the hill from the Neolithic period, at least by the 4th millennium BC. In the Late Bronze Age, during the 13th century BC, Athens became one of the Mycenaean centres of Greece. A palace probably stood on the summit, although almost nothing of it survives beneath the later temples.

The Mycenaean rulers surrounded the summit with a massive wall of large stones in the Cyclopean style, similar to those at Mycenae and Tiryns. Later Greeks called this the Pelargikon or Pelasgian wall and believed it had been built by an earlier people, the Pelasgians. Sections can still be seen near the Propylaia. A deep shaft cut into the north side of the rock gave defenders protected access to a water source.

From citadel to sanctuary

After the end of the Mycenaean palaces around 1200 BC, the Acropolis gradually lost its role as a royal residence. By the 8th and 7th centuries BC it had become chiefly a sanctuary of Athena Polias, Athena “of the city”, the protector of Athens.

In myth, Athena and the sea god Poseidon competed for the city. Poseidon struck the rock and produced a spring of salt water, while Athena created the first olive tree. The Athenians judged Athena’s gift the better and took her as their patron. Visitors in classical times were shown the marks of Poseidon’s trident and the sacred olive tree on the Acropolis.

In the 6th century BC Athens built its first large stone temples on the hill. The Panathenaic festival, held in honour of Athena, was reorganised in 566 BC, and every four years a great procession climbed the Acropolis to present the goddess with a new woven robe. The tyrant Pisistratus and his sons, discussed in Pisistratus, supported building on the rock, including the temple known as the Old Temple of Athena. Wealthy Athenians set up marble statues of young women, the korai, as offerings to the goddess.

After the Athenian victory at Marathon in 490 BC, work began on a new marble temple to Athena on the south side of the summit, known today as the Older Parthenon. It was still unfinished when disaster struck.

The Persian sack of 480 BC

In 480 BC the Persian king Xerxes I invaded Greece with a vast army. After the battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium, most Athenians evacuated their city, trusting in their fleet. A small group of defenders and temple officials remained on the Acropolis behind a wooden barricade.

Herodotus describes how the Persians, unable to force the western entrance, found a way up the steep north side near the shrine of Aglauros, where no guard had been posted. They killed the defenders, plundered the sanctuary and set fire to the temples. Xerxes sent news of the capture to Susa. When the Persians returned in 479 BC, before their defeat at Plataea, they caused further damage in Athens.

The Athenians and their allies defeated the Persian fleet at Salamis in September 480 BC, only days after the sack. When they returned, they did not immediately rebuild the temples. According to a tradition recorded later, the Greeks had sworn to leave the burned sanctuaries in ruins as a memorial, although historians debate whether this oath was genuine.

Instead, the Athenians rebuilt the walls of the Acropolis, setting column drums from the unfinished Older Parthenon into the north wall, where they can still be seen. They buried broken statues and debris in the fill used to level the summit. Archaeologists recovered many of these sculptures, including the painted korai, in excavations in the 1880s, giving a rare picture of Archaic Athenian art.

The Periclean rebuilding

In the mid-5th century BC Athens led the Delian League, an alliance of Greek states formed against Persia. In 454 BC the League’s treasury was moved from Delos to Athens. With peace with Persia established around 449 BC, the statesman Pericles persuaded the Athenians to use public funds, including money from the allies, for a grand building programme. Plutarch reports that his political opponents protested that Athens was dressing itself up with the allies’ money.

Work on the Parthenon began in 447 BC. It was designed by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, while the sculptor Phidias directed the sculptural decoration and created the gold and ivory cult statue of Athena Parthenos, about 12 metres high. The temple was dedicated in 438 BC, and its sculptures were finished in 432 BC. The full story of its construction is told in Parthenon (447 BC).

The Propylaia, the monumental gateway on the west side, was built from 437 BC to designs by Mnesicles. It was never fully completed, as the Peloponnesian War with Sparta broke out in 431 BC. On a bastion beside it the small Ionic Temple of Athena Nike, Athena of Victory, was built in the 420s BC.

The last major building was the Erechtheion, constructed between about 421 and 406 BC on the north side of the summit. It housed several ancient cults, including the old wooden statue of Athena Polias, and its south porch is famous for the six maiden statues, the Caryatids, that serve as columns. Between the Propylaia and the Parthenon stood Phidias’s colossal bronze statue of Athena Promachos, Athena who fights in the front line, said to be visible to sailors approaching Athens.

Key people

Pericles, the leading Athenian politician from about 461 BC until his death in 429 BC, championed the building programme and defended its cost. Phidias, the most celebrated sculptor of his age, oversaw the sculpture and made the two great statues of Athena. Ictinus and Callicrates designed the Parthenon, and Mnesicles the Propylaia. Thousands of craftsmen, quarrymen and labourers, many of them citizens, resident foreigners and enslaved workers, carried out the work, as surviving building accounts inscribed on stone record.

Later history

The Acropolis remained a sanctuary through the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Hellenistic kings such as the Attalids of Pergamon set up monuments there to win Athenian goodwill, and soon after 27 BC a small round temple to Roma and Augustus was built just east of the Parthenon. The slopes of the hill were also busy: the Theatre of Dionysus on the south side had been the home of Athenian drama since the 6th century BC, and in the 2nd century AD the wealthy Athenian Herodes Atticus built a roofed concert hall, the Odeon, beside it. The Odeon is still used for performances today.

In late antiquity Athens was sacked by the Heruli in AD 267, and the Parthenon appears to have suffered a serious fire at some point in this period, after which its interior was repaired with a new roof. Under Christian rule, probably in the 6th century AD, the Parthenon became a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In the 13th century the Acropolis served as the fortress and palace of the Frankish dukes of Athens, and after the Ottoman conquest in 1458 the Parthenon became a mosque.

On 26 September 1687, during a Venetian siege led by Francesco Morosini, a mortar shell struck the Parthenon, where the Ottoman garrison had stored gunpowder. The explosion destroyed the centre of the building and killed many people sheltering inside. Between 1801 and 1812 agents of Lord Elgin removed many of the Parthenon sculptures and other pieces, which are now in the British Museum. Their return has been requested by Greece for decades and remains a subject of public debate.

After Greek independence, later buildings were cleared from the summit in the 19th century. A long restoration programme began in 1975, the Acropolis was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and the new Acropolis Museum opened at the foot of the hill in 2009.

Timeline

• 4th millennium BC: Neolithic people live on and around the Acropolis.
• 13th century BC: The Mycenaean citadel is fortified with Cyclopean walls.
• 566 BC: The Panathenaic festival is reorganised.
• c. 490 BC: Work begins on the Older Parthenon after Marathon.
• 480 BC, September: The Persian army of Xerxes captures and burns the Acropolis.
• 447 BC: Construction of the Parthenon begins under Pericles.
• 437-432 BC: The Propylaia is built.
• c. 421-406 BC: The Erechtheion is built.
• 26 September 1687: A Venetian shell blows up the Parthenon.
• 1987: The Acropolis becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

The Acropolis tells the history of Athens in stone, from a Bronze Age fortress to a sanctuary destroyed by Persia and rebuilt at the height of Athenian power. Its 5th-century buildings shaped ideas of architectural beauty for more than two thousand years, and it remains one of the most visited and recognisable heritage sites in the world.