Dan Snow's History Hit - The Acropolis

Episode Date: August 31, 2025

From dazzling festivals honouring the goddess Athena to the engineering marvels of the Parthenon, Dan and classical historian Steve Kershaw explore how the Acropolis became the ultimate symbol of democracy, power, and devotion in Ancient Greece.Steve and Dan explain everything you need to know about this ancient hill that towers over the centre of Athens - from its role in Ancient Greek life, what the Parthenon friezes depict and how Lord Elgin controversially removed huge chunks of it to send back to Britain.This is the final episode in our travel history series 'Dan Snow's Guide to Europe'.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreJoin Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday, 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career, as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask!Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/.You can also get tickets for the live show of 'The Ancients' here - https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello folks, Dan Snow here. I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history hit. I'd love for you to be there. Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London, in England on the 12th of September to celebrate the 10 years. You can find out more about it and get tickets with the link in the show notes. Look forward to seeing you there. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month.

Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.C.A. The ancient Panathania festival took place on the Acropolis, the rocky hill that dominates the center of Athens. And it was a sight to behold up the Panathaniac way that zigzags from the city itself up to the Acropolis. Crowds chostled in their hundreds to catch a glimpse of the processions. There were athletics, it was music and it was a general celebration. It was a festival to mark the goddess Athena's birthday and that mattered because this was Athena's city. And by celebrating her birthday, you were celebrating the city's founding. You were

celebrating Athens. And for Athenians, this meant they were celebrating the end of tyranny, the dawn of democracy, of the rule of the people. Well, the men. But it wasn't just the men who would be found moving up that path towards those temples and statues at the top. The air would have been dusty. It would have somehow tasted of olive oil, I think. You would have smelled the cattle sweating up the hill with wreaths in their horns. You'd have had horses with their flanks shiny, the swords of their riders glinting in the sunlight.

Behind those riders, there would have been maidens. Their faces composed, carrying baskets on their head with all sorts of produce, including barley, and a sacrificial knife hidden upon them. needed for the opening rituals. Elsewhere on the Acropolis, there were in sprinters, racing, men wrestling in the dust, musicians plucking at their instruments and singing, all vying for the coveted prize of the Panathenaic amphora, filled with olive oil from the sacred grove in Athens.

As the animals were sacrificed, those competitions were held, poetry was read. We think it lasted a week, possibly even 12 days. In the end, there was this grand procession that would have been attended by citizens, and foreigners alike, not slaves, though. And the purpose of that was to bring a new extravagant sort of robe or shawl to the enormous statue of Athena on the Acropolis. And it was said that that was so big had to be carried on a ship's mast. And the ship itself, weirdly, it brought the ship along with the mast,

and it's made its way of the land in an enormous wheeled cart. Now, if you've been lucky enough to visit the Acropolis in Athens, you know that it's not easy climbing that big, steep. rocky hill, and therefore how astonishing it must have been to witness that procession, indeed, and that ship being dragged to the top of it. The limestone outcrop has been sacred, we think, since the Bronze Age, at least. Long before the big temples like the Parthenon that are there now were perched on top. It was a fortified hill. There was a small shrine to Athena Polyas, the city's protector, and over time it became Athens' ceremonial heart. It isn't just a site of

stunning ancient architecture. It's the beating heart of Athens. It's a place where religion and politics and identity have all met, and they've done so for millennia. So if you're visiting Athens this year, or you always wondered, what is the difference really between the Acropolis and the Parthorn? Well, this is the episode for you. I'm joined by the really fantastic classical historian, Steve Kershaw, a buddy of mine, we travel around Greece together, to bring you an ultimate guide to the history of the Acropolis in Athens. Enjoy. Hi, Steve. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much, Dan. I'm delighted to be here. Absolutely delighted to be here. Steve, I think you and I once had a beer overlooking the Acropolis, and you cannot miss that geology, that better rock. So way before Athens existed, presumably humans thought, hang on, this is a decent place to live to protect ourselves, to get away from it all. Absolutely. It's a remarkable chunk of the Athenian landscape, really. You've got this quite sort of sheer, but not that high. hill, big limestone outcrop that's got a nice flat top where you can go and hide and defend yourself, I think, and where you can worship your gods from. It's got springs in the side of it as well, so you've got all the natural resources you need. It's perfect. And people have been making use of that since, yeah, kind of way back in the Stone Age. Really? So we've got Neolithic

settlers up there. When do we start to see ancient Greece come together as people will recognize Is it Minoan? Is it Mycenaean? What's the earliest bit of that Bronze Age culture we see up there? Yeah, I'd say really it's the Mycenaean period where things really start to get going. And you see constructions there. There's still evidence of construction up there on the Acropolis. You've got, if you like, palatial structures there. And what they call these cyclopean walls, these walls that are built out of masonry that's so huge that later Greeks didn't really believe that human beings could erect them. It had to be the Cyclops that built them.

So they called it Cyclopeian masonry. So you get some of that up there. And at the risk of getting a bit ancient aliens here, do we know now? Do we think we know how they would have got those enormous rocks up there? Yeah. I mean, one of the particular pieces of cool technology they had was a pendulum saw that would sort of swing on a pendulum

and you could cut sort of huge chunks of rock like that in fairly efficient ways. So there's, yeah, we don't need ancient aliens. We just need a bit of decent, ancient technology and some good bronze hardware. So we've got Mycenaeans up there. When do we get something called Athens? It kind of comes in, I suppose, around the 7th, 8th, 7th centuries BC, B.C.E, if you prefer,

when you start to see structures there being built on the Acropolis. And it becomes essentially an area that's sacred to the goddess Athena, who's the main patron deity of Athens. So we start to see constructions there that increase and multiply and become more impressive over time. That's interesting. So around about the time that Homer is reciting or composing his Iliad modesty, we see sort of Athens taking shape, do we? I think we do, yes, absolutely. And the Athenians are very keen that they should be interpolated into Homer's poems. So their mythical kings end up in the catalogue of ships that send forces to Troy. And they start to develop the Acropolis as a kind of sacred area as well as a, if you like, a defensive stronghold

at around that time as the city is growing from its small beginnings into something that becomes mighty, powerful and very cultural. And is the city up there to start with, or is it always a last bastion and a religious site? Is the city down close to the sea down in the lower ground? Yeah, the city is underneath it really. Acropolis, that word, means the high city. So it's a stronghold, a religious place. Generally speaking, the city grows up around it at sort of at the base of the acropolis and then spreads into the surrounding farmlands. And Athens is also near enough to the sea to be able to connect itself to good ports and the world beyond. What do we know about these early temples? Because there was quite a lot of landscaping that

went on over the centuries that followed. Yeah, there was much building. And there was particularly under the reign of what they call the Pisistrates. Athens had a sort of tyrannical regime, but they made major building projects. So you have some quite large temples being put up there on the Acropolis in about the 6th century BC, which are large-scale buildings with very impressive sculptures attached to them as well. So it's developed as a monumental complex from around the 6th century BC onwards. And does the story of the Acropolis that we recognize today, does that start with the great

Persian invasion of 480 BC, the aftermath, the Battle of Thermopyla that people will be familiar with? Yeah, it does in many ways, because after the Battle of Thermopyla, before the Greek victories at Salamis, ultimately, Athens was sacked by the Persians. That was one of their war aims. And a great deal of material on the Acropolis was simply destroyed and burnt. So after the Persian invasions, essentially the Acropolis was the Athenians' grand. The Athenians' grand. zero, if you like. It was just a smoldering ruin. And decisions then had to be made about what to do with it. Originally, they decided that they would leave it desolate as a, in their words, as a monument to the sacrilege of the barbarians. But ultimately, they then decided that

they would change that policy and they would start a major construction project about in the middle of the 5th century. I mean, it's an extraordinary construction project. Is something going on Athens at the time? Is the money flowing in? What is this? Because there's an imperial flavour to it, isn't it? I mean, it's a monumental project. It is. And this is interesting, I think, because it's essentially, it is an imperial project, and it's not paid for by the Athenians. So after the Persian invasions, the Greeks essentially went on the offensive to try and recoup their losses in the war. And Athens became the focus of a coalition that fought a war of revenge against the Persians. But it ultimately converted what had been a free confederacy of

Greek states into its own empire. And they had a treasury where they collected the funds. In due course, they moved that treasury from the sacred island of Delos to Athens. And those funds then became the wherewithal with which they built those amazing buildings on the Acropolis. What was that sort of protection money? That's going into the pot to protect us from the Persians, and now it's suddenly getting used to create grandiose imperial projects in Athens? Exactly so, yes. Much of this was dedicated to the goddess Athena. They essentially, they creamed off one 60th of it and used that to make their building projects on the Acropolis. So it's not really a monument to democracy and freedom in its originality.

It's very much an imperial monument that's a testament to the might and the financial ruthlessness. of the Athenians and their leaders. Yeah, that's interesting, Steve, because I was going to ask about how it reflects the Athenian democracy that people will be familiar with and is seen as a great model and is very exciting. Actually, the story of the Acropolis doesn't seem super relevant.

The Athenian democracy and the Acropolis are kind of slight distinct strands of Athenian history. Yeah, in a sense they are. I mean, they're tangled up with each other. By the time that they were making the building projects there, they developed their democracy over a period of 150,000. years or so to quite a radical form of that democracy. But they were powerful enough then to

exert control over a wider empire and to use the funds that flowed in from that as the means to build. And they're quite transparent about it. They publish all over the Acropolis were monuments inscribed in stone with the accounts. We know who was paying what, where the money was come from, how it was being spent, the kind of materials that were coming in. The Athenians were, as good Democrats, they were certainly into transparency, but it's quite interesting what they're transparent about. Tell people what the Acropolis would have looked like then at the end of this astonishing building spree.

You walk up to it, and you don't come to the Parthenon, the huge classical temple straight away. What do you come to first? No, you don't. It's amazing how you're manipulated as you go up there. I think. It was really interesting. They've used the architectural principles, I think, of, if you're like, preparation, tension and release. So it creates excitement, feeling of anticipation, and then it gives you your big exciting view when you get up there. So as you ascend the Acropolis, first of all, there's a small temple to Athena, Nike, the victory aspect of Athena, the war goddess, on your right. It's beautiful, isn't it? It's on a little sort of spur. It looks like it's almost floating above the city. It's beautiful. Absolutely. It's exquisite, tiny, sort of built in the ionic style, very small, very elegant. They sometimes call it the temple of wingless victory, the victory that would never fly away from Athens.

It's a beautiful thing that you see, and it's up there above you as you head on in. It's gorgeous. And then as you head on in, you come to a structure that's known as the propylia. It's the great monumental gateway, which has a great doorway in front of you and sort of wings that envelop you on either side. And as you ascend, you lose sight of all the other buildings that's there, and you go for out of the light into the dark, and then you emerge again into the light, and in front of you, above you, slightly to your right, you have the towering presence of the Parthenon Temple. And over to your left, you have the Erich Theon Temple, which is perhaps more important religiously. And in antiquity also pretty much on axis, there would have been a huge bronze statue of Athena, as well. well. That's interesting. So where would the bronze touch of Athena been? So pretty much central as you come straight through the gateway, smack in front of you. And would you've been able to see that sort of shining from a long way away? You would. Apparently it was visible from sea.

So it was a great monument, you know, Athenian seafarers coming home, would eventually be able to see that monument as a symbol of their homecoming. I bet that was a sight for sore eyes for mariners and after a tough few weeks on the Aegean. Should we think about the buildings, structure on the slopes as part of this plan, Theatre of Dionysus. Well, I think there are two theatres, aren't they, where some of the great drama and comedy of all time would have been performed? Very much so. Down on the slopes, you've got principally, I guess the most important space is the Theatre of Dionysus, which was, again, developed over a period of time, but that's where those extraordinary pieces of drama, the tragedies of Eeschylus and Sophocles and Eurypides, the

comedies of Aristophanes were played out. So that's a crucial aspect of the, if you like, the sacred complex that's there, because these are religious performances as well. And also, as well, you get other monuments that come in at different times. People over history were keen to make their mark in Athens, perhaps by benefactions. So you have, amongst other things, you have the Stoer of Eumenes, who was a ruler of the kingdom of Pergamon in the Hellenistic period. And then there's a later Roman structure, the O'Don, a kind of concert hall built by Herodes Atticus. So Athens constantly attracted benefactors over the years to enhance its public image. You're listening to Dan Snow's history here.

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of the last three women to be hanged for witchcraft in England. Find us every Monday. and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts, and now on YouTube. After Dark, myths, misdeeds and the paranormal is created by the award-winning network History Hit. So the purpose of the Acropolis and all the building is religious, it's imperial, is it to celebrate the victory of Athens and the Greeks, although I expect, though, other Greek contributions would get minimize as the way of these things, as we still see in the modern day. It's just a sort of giant

celebration of Athenianness. In many ways it is, I think. It's a feel-good thing for the Athenians. It's constantly towering over them. It's a reminder of their past, their success in the past, their prosperity. So in a sense, it's about that. It's about their imperial prowess. It is religious as well. It's the focus of a lot of really important and often quite weird religious ceremonies. And it is also a fortified stronghold as well. So in a sense, it has a triple purpose. And I think reactions to it would be, as you say, very different. You know, an Athenian looking at that would respond very differently, I think, to, I don't know, one of the islanders who they ruled over whose people had essentially paid for all of this. There might be different

ways of looking at it over the time. Tell me about some of those slightly weird festivals that went on. Oh, goodness me. Well, there's the sort of mythical Kings of Athens are so strange. The Athenians thought themselves as autotthonous. So they literally thought that they came from the land, the earth, that they inhabited. They'd always been there. And their early kings are kind of half man, half snake. Those early kings are worshipped on the Acropolis as well. Athena is their prime deity, Athens and Athena, the same thing. So she looks after them. She protects the city. Athena Polyas, as they call her, the protector of the city has an important shrine in the Eric Theon Temple. And Athena Parthenos, Athena the maiden, Athena

the Virgin, is celebrated in the Parthenon Temple as well, both with the temple and a huge gold and ivory statue. So Athena is up there, but it's not just her or the kings. There's Poseidon, is up there because Athena and Poseidon contest the possession of Athens by performing miracles. Poseidon smashes his trident into the acropolis and a saltwater well springs up

which they preserve in the Eric Thaon. Athena makes the first olive tree grow, the first cultivated olive and that's seen to be a much more useful gift and useful miracle. So she gets the gig. She becomes Athens' patron deity.

So Poseidon and Athena are honored there. Zeus of the city he's honored there as well. There's shrines to Artemis and various other deities and other Athenian mythical heroes there. So there's a whole conglomeration. It's very much the focus of Athenian religious response, if you like. And along the top, sort of above the columns of the Parthenon, you've got the famous Parthenon freeze, which has been known in Britain for the decades as the Elgin Marbles, because they were stolen, they were removed, they were preserved by Elgin, Lord Elgin. So first of all, what does the freeze show, and then let's get the Elgin thing sorted out? Yeah, the Parthenon has an amazing

sculptural program all around it, to an extent that no other building really in the ancient world had had up to that point. And it includes a freeze. It's about 160 metres long that shows a procession. There's lots of discussion about what this procession is, but probably it's related to a festival known as the Panathania, which was held every year and then on a major scale every four years by the Athenians in honor of Athena, where they presented her with a new robe at these great festivals. And so you have a wonderful procession of initially horsemen getting ready and then a sort of great cavalcade of horsemen. In front of them, there are charioteers. In front of them, there are pedestrians. In front of them, there are animals for sacrifice. And then you sort of

converge over the main entrance with female figures bringing sacrificial equipment. You have what are probably the heroes of the Athenian tribes as intermediaries between the mortals and the gods. And then in the middle, you have the 12 Olympian gods of Athens and a very, very strange ceremony going on with a robe right over the main door. And who was Lord Elgin? Lord Elgin was. He had a wonderful title. He was the ambassador. extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of his Britannic majesty to the sublime port of Selim the third Sultan of Turkey. So he was an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, based primarily

in Istanbul, Constantinople, but because what is now Greece was then part of the Ottoman Empire, Greece was part of his patch. And at the time, he was sort of building a new house, at Broom Hall in Scotland, and this was a great opportunity for him to have drawings made and casts made of the sculptures and the architectural elements to facilitate the building of this house in this new most fashionable style. So there was a great opportunity for him to learn from the building and transport it back to Scotland in a sense, perhaps just in a graphic sense to start with, but things kind of developed. Well, they developed, didn't they? Because you he ended up, sawing them out and taking great big slabs of them home?

Yes, he did. So what happened was the local guys on the ground. For a lot of the time, Elgin himself wasn't there. He was in Constantinople. But he had a team of people who were there, including an Italian artist called Giovanni Battista Lucieri. And they were allowed to make the drawings and measurements, but they weren't allowed to put scaffolding up to make casts.

So they asked for permission in the end, from the central government of Turkey. And they acquired a letter, a thing that's called a Furman, which is a hugely controversial document. The original of it doesn't survive. We have an Italian translation of it that was made for Luceri that gave them permission, perhaps. It says an instruction that no one meddled with their scaffolding or implements,

nor hinder them from taking away any pieces of stone with inscriptions or figures. So you can interpret that how you like, I think, and they did. And in the end, how much of that freeze was removed? So roughly half of it. Now, the sort of split between museums is that roughly 50% of it is in Athens. Roughly 50% of it is in London, with a few outliers elsewhere in the Louvre and Copenhagen, in Munich and Würzburg and various other places. but the main collections are half in Athens, half in London.

And there is a lively debate and negotiations that will, in fact, return from London to Athens. What state was it in when Lord Elgin turned up? Let's talk a little bit about the fate of the Acropolis. I guess in the immediate aftermath, Athens loses the Peloponnesian War to Sparta in the early 400s BC. So very shortly after it's built, really, this great imperial monument, Athens goes and loses the Great Imperial War. It does, yeah. So Athens is ultimately defeated in the Peloponnesian war by the Spartans and then fades from its once amazing power base. The big power that's built up next really is the Macedonian power under Philip II, who's the father of Alexander the Great. So that becomes part of their

realms. They are then rolled over by the Romans who take over Greece and Athens becomes part of the Roman Empire, which then merges into the Byzantine Empire, which, is finally rolled over by the Ottomans in 1453 when Constantinople is taken. About three years later, Athens is taken over by Omar, one of the generals, and it becomes part of the Ottoman Empire at that stage. And that's the point it is when Elgin and his team go to Athens. And what state was it, was it maintained? Any stage, was it sacked or just looted or what state preservation was it in over those changes of, those various changes of regime? Yeah, it was in a bit of a mess, really, because after the pagan period, if you like, it had been a pagan temple for about

a thousand years. It then became a Christian church. Christians were not particularly careful about the preservation of pagan things on their buildings, and they made modifications to the buildings. The Turks had no care for it really either. So it had had a rough old time of it over the years. Some deliberate damage done to it and other damage, just the wear and tear of the environment. And also in a war between the Turks and the Venetians, where the Turks were storing ammunition in it, because the Acropolis was a military base for them. There was a huge explosion when the Venetians fired a shell into it, and that did a huge amount of damage as well. So the building has had a really, really rough old time of it over the centuries. So it was in a bit of a mess when

Elgin's team got there. Did Elgin, and I'm not justifying anything here, but did Elgin help that conservation preservation by saving bits of it, or did he actually speed up its deterioration, would he say? That's a good question. It cuts both ways, I think. It's that by taking it and preserving it, I mean, he felt very strongly that he was preserving it from amongst other things Turkish vandalism. That was one of the things he used to justify it, I think. And certainly I think the high state of preservation of what is now in London is partly down to that. So in a sense, he preserved. He also damaged, of course, because in order to take these sculptures and things off the

building, for a lot of the time, he had to dismantle parts of the building and saw them off. So it was a destructive and preservation process at one and the same time. And actually removing from the building and putting them indoors has helped. because I think if you compare and contrast the casts that he made, so he also made casts of these buildings, casts at the time, you compare those with some of the things that are now in Athens, which have been on the building for an extra 200 years.

You can see the state of decay that simply leaving them out in the open air has done. So it cuts both ways. I noticed when I went there recently, there's a huge amount of work going on. Is that sort of conservation? Is it archaeology? or are they even doing a bit of reconstruction? What's the plan for the Acropolis?

There's been a major plan that's been going on since the middle of the 1980s, actually. It's been going on a very long time. Yeah, so there's a sense of restoration and repair. They're putting things back where it's possible to put them back and doing so in a way that you can see. So they're using material that's slightly whiter

than the other material that's already on the building. So they're putting things back, They're strengthening, they're preserving, studying all the time, and generally trying to restore it in the best, most coherent and a most sensitive way they can. The sculptures, not on the building, they've all been moved now to the absolutely stupendous Acropolis Museum just across the way, so they're safely cared for now. But yeah, it's a major ongoing project that's allowed us to learn, I think, a lot about the building and its construction techniques and its history. It's very crowded, isn't it? I mean, I think the single most useful bit of advice I can give is to go as early as possible in the morning. Absolutely.

I mean, it's a wondrous place to visit, but it's hugely popular. And I'm with you there. Either you should try and get there the second it opens if you're going to make a visit or go quite late in the day when the temperature is cooled a little bit. And you also get very nice light later on in the day as well, and you get that. But it's incredibly busy. And yeah, the Greeks now are seeking to control access to it as much as they can. So get a timed ticket if you're going to go as well. Thank you so much, Steve.

Pleasure. I'm sure anyone will listen to that, wishes that it could go with you on a tour around the Acropolis. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Big pleasure, Dan. Thank you for having me. Well, folks, it is hard to believe yesterday. that we've arrived at the beginning of September. There's a bit of chill in the air where I am now.

And my wife is driving me crazy because she's desperate to get the candles and the cozy blankets out and the sort of autumn vibe going. And she's joined in that devilish enterprise by Marianna DeForge, the producer of this podcast. So I'm getting it from both angles here. Us summer clingers onto are having it tough at the moment.

Still feels like summer. So let it be folks. This episode does, however, bring us the end of our special summer season, and the travel season of Dan Snow's history. We've reached the end of our European tour for the summer of 2025 and we'll soon be back looking at the,

I don't know, is it, the darker history, the autumnal history of autumn, of fall. We're going to be looking at medieval battles in mud-choked fields, witch trials, and the Victorian Macarborough, which I trust you will find enjoyable. All I can do now is to ask you to leave us a little summer of you wherever you get your podcast,

and let us know where you're going to be. might like us to go next summer. Oh, happy thought. Our email address is ds.h.h.h at history hit.com. See you next time. Bye-bye. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca.