The Temple
of Olympian Zeus, also known as the Olympieion, is an
Greco-Roman temple in the center of Athens, southeast of the Acropolis. Begun in the 6th century
BC, it was not completed until the reign of the Emperor Hadrian in
the 2nd century AD. In was at that time the largest temple in Greece.
Located in southern Athens, between
the Acropolis and the Ilissos river, the Olympieion was the sanctuary of
Olympian Zeus.
The site of the Olympieion was a place of worship of
chthonic deities and of ancient Athenian heroes Athens since prehistory.
Peisistratus the Young initiated the construction of a monumental temple in 515
BC, but failed to complete his project because of the fall of tyranny. The
temple remained unfinished for approximately 400 years, until Antiochus IV
Epiphanes resumed its construction in 174 BC. It was completed in AD 124/125 by
Emperor Hadrian, who associated himself with Zeus and adopted the title of
Olympios.
During the years of Greek democracy, the temple was
left unfinished, apparently because the Greeks of the classical period thought
it anti-democratic to build on such a scale.
Work resumed in the 3rd century BC, during the period
of Macedonian domination of Greece, under the patronage of the Hellenistic king
Antiochus IV of Syria. Antiochus hired the Roman architect Cossutius to design
the largest temple in the known world, but when Antoichus died in 164 BC the
work was delayed again.
In the 2nd century AD, the temple was
taken up again by Hadrian, a great admirer of Greek culture, who
finally brought it to completion in 129 or 131.The temple is made of fine marble brought from Mount Pentelus and originally measured 96 meters long and 40 meters wide.
There were originally 104 Corinthian columns, each 17 meters high;
48
of these stood in triple rows under the pediments and 56
in double rows at the sides. Only 15 columns remain standing today, with lovely Corinthian capitals still in place.
A 16th column blew over in
1852 and is still lying where it fell. In A
Classical and Topographical Tour Through Greece (1819), Dodwell
relates that four charges of gunpowder had to be set before the column
fell. Tzistarakis was fined 8500 piastres "for having destroyed
those venerable remains," dismissed and later poisoned. Another column was
blown over in a storm in 1852, its scattered drums still to be seen stacked on
the ground. Now only fifteen columns of the original peristyle remain standing.
