The Agora of Athens

The word agora (ἀγορά) first meant a gathering of people, and then the place where people gathered. In Athens the Agora was a flat, open square between three hills: the rock of the Acropolis, the hill of the Areopagus and a low hill called Kolonos Agoraios.

People lived on this spot long before it became a square. Early in the 6th century BC, in the time of the lawmaker Solon (Σόλων), it became a public space for all citizens. Stone posts marked its edges. One of them, from about 500 BC, still carries its message: “I am the boundary stone of the Agora”. The Greek word for such a stone is ὅρος.

An important road crossed the square, the Panathenaic Way. Every year a great procession walked along it, up to the Acropolis, to honour the goddess Athena. Near the middle of the square stood the Altar of the Twelve Gods. The Athenians saw it as the very centre of their city: distances to other places were measured from it.

The Agora was also a busy market. Sellers set up their goods in the square and in the buildings around it. The verb ἀγοράζω first meant “to spend time in the agora”. Later it came to mean “to buy in the market”, and then simply “to buy”. To sell was πωλέω.

Someone had to make sure that nobody cheated. The Athenians chose by lot ten market inspectors, the ἀγορανόμοι: five for the city and five for the harbour of Piraeus. The philosopher Aristotle tells us that their job was to stop people from selling bad or fake goods.

Around the square stood long buildings called stoas (στοά). A stoa was a roofed colonnade: a long hall, open at the front, with a row of columns. In a stoa people could find shade in summer and shelter from the rain. Some stoas had shops. The Middle Stoa, built in the 2nd century BC, was used mainly for trade. In 159–138 BC King Attalos II of Pergamon gave the city a large stoa with two floors, the Stoa of Attalos.

The Agora was the place where democracy did its daily work. Along its west side stood the most important public buildings:

• The Bouleuterion (βουλευτήριον): the meeting hall of the Council of 500, the βουλή. The Council prepared new laws, which the Assembly of all citizens then discussed and voted on.
• The Tholos (θόλος): a round building from about 470 BC. Fifty council members, the prytaneis, worked there as a kind of daily government.
• The Monument of the Eponymous Heroes: a long base with bronze statues of the ten heroes who gave their names to the ten tribes of Athens.
• The Royal Stoa (Στοὰ Βασίλειος): the office of the official in charge of religion and the laws.

The gods were never far away. On the hill above the square stands the temple of Hephaistos, god of fire and metalwork, and of Athena. It was built in the second half of the 5th century BC, and it is still standing today. Many people call it the Theseion, though it was not a temple of Theseus.

The Agora was also a place to think and talk. The writer Xenophon tells us that the philosopher Socrates (Σωκράτης) went to the market every morning and spent the day where most people were, talking with anyone who wanted to listen. Near the edge of the Agora archaeologists found the house of Simon the shoemaker, where Socrates is said to have met his pupils.

About a hundred years later, the philosopher Zeno (Ζήνων) from Kition in Cyprus taught while walking up and down the Painted Stoa (Στοὰ Ποικίλη), named after its famous paintings. His followers were called “the people of the stoa”: the Stoics.

The Agora was damaged by the Persians in 480/79 BC, by the Romans in the 1st century BC and by the Heruli, a people from the north, in AD 267. Later it was slowly abandoned, and houses were built on top of it. In 1931 the American School of Classical Studies began to dig it out. Around 400 modern buildings had to be pulled down. In 1953–56 the Stoa of Attalos was rebuilt, and today it is the Agora’s museum.