Introduction

Today the crowds that visit the Acropolis, after having passed through the
Propylaia, trample upon the ruins of a temple without any suspicion that
they are in a place of particular significance, noticing only the Erechtheion
to the left and the Parthenon to the right. But this very fact indicates that in
the plan of the Acropolis as conceived by Pericles these ruins occupied a
central position. When the Acropolis was rebuilt in the second half of the
fifth century B.C., in the wake of Athens final victory over the Persians, the
Propylaia were given a new orientation in order to direct attention to these
ruins. Those who ascended the Acropolis, after having passed through
Pericles Propylaia, had their view and way barred by the wall that
supported the Terrace with the ruins of the Old Temple of Athena. This
temple had been sacked, burned and wrecked by the Persians when in 480
B.C. the Athenians, for the sake of the national resistance to the barbarian
invaders, made the extreme sacrifice of abandoning their homes and
temples to the enemy. The ruins of this temple were the monument of
Athens greatest claim to glory, a claim that was used to justify Athens
assumption of the leadership of the Greek world and further to justify the
transformation of this leadership into imperial domination. The Athenians
wanted to bare their wounds, wounds that were proffered as the main
rationale for Athenian policy in the fifth century B.C. Because the
Athenians did not want to obliterate the memorial of the Persian invasion,
the temple that was intended to replace the destroyed temple, the one
popularly called the Parthenon, was not erected on top of the old one, as
might have been expected, but to the south of it.
The ruins were given further emphasis by placing against their supporting
Terrace and on the axis of the Propylaia a bronze statue of Athena, known as
Athena Promachos, that reached the colossal height of about thirty meters.
Since it was erected when the construction of the Parthenon was beginning,
it follows that statue and temple were part of a single conception. The
ancient visitors to Pericles Acropolis, after having been properly impressed
by this towering statue, directly on the axis of the new Propylaia, had to
continue their way by turning to the right and passing between the long side
of the ruins of the Old Temple and the long side of the Parthenon.
The route taken by the ancient visitors was substantially the course of the
Sacred Way, designed for Athens greatest ceremony, the Panathenaic
Procession. After having formed outside the main gate of the city on the
bank of the river Eridanos, which represented the westernmost limit of the
world, the procession reached the end of its trek by passing between the

ruins of the Temple of Athena that had been destroyed by the enemy and the
Temple of Athena that had been erected as a piously necessary replacement
for it. Upon reaching the top of the hill, the procession reached its final goal
by turning to the right to encounter the image of Athena Parthenos in the
Parthenon. In earlier times, before the destruction of the Old Temple, the
procession had passed through the earlier Propylaia in a more northerly
direction and, after ascending the Terrace, continued along the northern
flank of the Old Temple, before turning right to reach the image of Athena
Polias inside this temple. It is remarkable that the altar of Athena, as far as
we are able to establish, continued to be in front of the ruins of the Old
Temple. If the modern visitors to the Acropolis were forced to follow the
Sacred Way, instead of swarming like a mob of barbarians over the ruins of
the Old Temple, not only would they be taught the proper respect for the
views and feelings of the ancient Athenians, but also would be led to grasp
the esthetic organization of Pericles Acropolis as a whole.
The modern visitors cannot be blamed if they look at the Acropolis without
any sense of its religious and intellectual significance, because this is the
way in which it has been seen by archaeologists. The present conception of
ancient studies manifests itself most clearly in the way the Acropolis is seen
by scholars: it is seen as a living room full of bric-a-brac displayed for its
supposed antiquarian, sentimental or decorative value in order to enhance
the prestige of its owner. Not one scholar has even tried to see the Acropolis
as an organic structure.1 But if we consider with unprejudiced eyes the
spatial organization of the Acropolis, it becomes clear that the heart of the
Acropolis is the Terrace of the Old Temple.
In the Mycenaean Age, even before the Acropolis became a citadel by the
construction of a defense wall around it, its most important structure was a
terrace which with slight modifications became the Terrace of the Old
Temple. Archaeological investigations have revealed that the Terrace of the
Old Temple is the oldest known substantial construction on the Acropolis; it
dates from the very close of the Bronze Age, presumably about 1300
B.C.2 At that time the Acropolis was not fortified. Access to the Terrace was
gained by ascending the Acropolis from the north side and then stepping
onto the Terrace by a staircase, oriented from north to south, which ended
where there was later the east side (backside) of the rectangle of the altar.
At the close of the Mycenaean Age, presumably ca. 1000 B.C., the
Acropolis was fortified by constructing a megalithic wall, the Pelasgic Wall,
which extended the area of the Acropolis to the maximum allowed by the
natural features of the ground. This wall followed an irregular curved course
determined by the need to exploit the characteristics of the rock. The
entrance was rotated ninety degrees to the west and was made to run
between the supporting wall of the Terrace and the new line of fortification.

The wall was similar in conception and in type of construction to the

fortification wall of Tiryns. At this time the Acropolis became a place of
refuge for the surrounding population in case of attack, whereas before it
must have been merely a religious and political center.
Either at the time of the construction of the fortification wall or soon
thereafter, the Acropolis was provided with a second gate, located at the
southwest corner, where the ascent is more gentle. Today visitors ascend
from this side. In order to protect this entrance which, for the same reason
that it was more convenient was most dangerous in case of attack, there was
constructed a bastion (pyrgos),extending to the west, which later became the
support of the Temple of Athena Nike. The gate was just to the north of this
bastion.
Practically nothing is known about the history of the Acropolis from the
close of the Mycenaean Age to the Persian invasion of 480 B.C. As far as
we know, the system of fortifications was still the original one at the time of
the Persian invasion. The only modification was the opening of the
fortification line in correspondence with the western gate.
The opening of the fortifications of the Acropolis was achieved by
constructing a decorative entrance hall with columns, the propylaia, which
replaced the fortified western gate. The foundations of these Propylaia have
been found below the foundations of the much larger and more monumental
Propylaia constructed later by Pericles. Apparently the Propylaia were
erected by the early democracy, damaged by the Persians, repaired in some
way after their withdrawal, and finally demolished when Pericles sponsored
the construction of completely new Propylaia, designed by the architect
Mnesicles (437-432 B.C.).
Whereas the later Propylaia of Pericles were oriented so as to face the
western wall of the Terrace of the Old Temple, the first Propylaia were
oriented about 30 degrees more to the north. This indicates that at the time
the most important area of the Acropolis, after the Terrace, was that north of
the Terrace, between the north wall of the Acropolis and the north wall of
the Terrace. The pre-Persian Propylaia were oriented to what was then the
most important area of the Acropolis and remained forever the most holy
one, the side against the north wall. They were aimed exactly to a point just
north of the present North Portico, where the olive of Athena grew inside
the ancient Erechtheion. After the Persians reduced this temple to rubble
and the olive tree to a smoldering stump, the Erechtheion was rebuilt so that
its western wall came to form a backdrop for it, allowing visitors to admire
its new shoots (Herodotos VIII.55). Earlier, there had been a road that went
from the Propylaia to the olive tree, coasting the north side of the Terrace
that supported the Old Temple of Athena. We may presume that within the

original fortified Acropolis the main internal road went from the north gate
to the west gate, passing along the north side of the Terrace. At the time of
the construction of the first Propylaia there was a staircase of access to the
Terrace from the north side.3 It was only after the withdrawal of the
Persians, when the area of the Acropolis was extended to the south in
preparation for the construction of the Parthenon, that the most important
road within the Acropolis, that followed the Panathenaic Procession from
the western gate to the altar, was made to skirt the south side of the Terrace.
Let us remember that the Terrace of the Old Temple was still standing in the
Periclean age, although at the middle of it there were only ruins. The
Persians had razed the Old Temple to the ground, or almost to the ground.
There is an extreme conservatism in the history of the architectural
arrangement of the Acropolis. When the Acropolis was built up in the
Mycenaean Age, before it was surrounded by a fortified wall, the main
structure was the wall that retained the Terrace which became later the
Terrace of the Old Temple. This Terrace was still the main feature of the
Acropolis when the Persians seized Athens in 480 B.C. At the time of the
Persian invasion the circuit of the walls of the Acropolis was essentially
what it had been at the end of the Mycenaean Age and the Temple of Athena
was about at the center of it. This fortified wall remained substantially the
defense line when the Persians stormed the Acropolis. When the Acropolis
was rebuilt after the Persian destruction, the line of the walls was radically
changed on the west by the construction of the Periclean Propylaia and on
the south side by the erection of the Cimonian Wall, but on the north side it
remained essentially what it had been in the Mycenaean Age. In the
Periclean Acropolis the Terrace of the Old Temple was no longer the main
element, but it remained the focal point around which all the rest was
organized spatially.
This architectural conservatism of the Athenian Acropolis affects the matter
that concerns us the most here. We shall see that the Old Temple of Athena
shows characteristics that are unusual in a Greek temple, but are the result
of the fact that this temple follows closely the internal organization and
dimensions of a Mycenaean Royal Megaron. We shall see that the Periclean
Parthenon was planned to follow many of the internal details and
dimensions of the Old Temple, so that one must turn to Mycenaean
architecture to explain some of the aspects of the Parthenon.

References
1. The only exception is provided by an outsider, the famous expert of
modern city planning Doxiadis, who as a Greek has tried to draw
inspiration from the ancient monuments of his native country. He
assumed that Greek holy places must have had an organic structure,

but unfortunately he tried to find the solution in the principle of

vision.
2. Late Helladic III, presumably ca. 1300 B.C. The importance of the
terrace of the Old Temple has been recognized in the study of the
prehistory of the Acropolis by Spiridonos E. Iakovidis, He
Mykenaike Akropolis ton Athenon (Athens, 1962).
3. The present staircase to the north of the Erechtheion could be
considered a reminder of the ancient north gate. However, the steps
of the present staircase ascend from west to east, whereas those of
the ancient gate ascended in the opposite direction.