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King Antiochus IV (reigned 175–164 BC) called himself in all modesty "Epiphanes" (god appearing).
The house that he wanted to dedicate to his chief superior, Zeus, had to be correspondingly magnificent.
And so he had a cult building erected in Athens that is longer than a football field and almost as wide: the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Olympieion, the largest ancient building on mainland Greece.
Today 15 of the 17 meter high columns still stand in the middle of the Athens Moloch traffic and away from the tourist routes.
Because the temple was built on the outskirts of the ancient city, around 500 meters east of the Acropolis.
Now it too is to be taken out of its niche existence with a comprehensive restoration.
The first pillars have already been scaffolded and the work should be completed in 2023.
An ambitious undertaking, since Minister of Education Lina Mendoni has to admit that it is "a project with many difficulties and problems that will only come to light in the course of the work".
The ruins of the Athens Temple of Zeus at the foot of the Acropolis
Source: picture alliance / PantherMedia
A rare sight in February 2021
Source: picture alliance / ANE / Eurokin
Because the Olympieion has always been in the shadow of the much more famous (and significantly smaller) Parthenon temple on the Acropolis, which has always attracted everyone's attention as a symbol of the glory of Athens - optically, art-historically and politically.
“The Olympieion has not been explored,” says the ancient historian Hans-Joachim Gehrke.
The former president of the German Archaeological Institute refers to the extremely complicated building history, which stretches over 650 years and reflects epochal historical upheavals.
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Like the Parthenon, the Olympieion is a monument to power, but not to the democratically constituted polis of Athens, but to its tyrants.
Middle of the 6th century BC
BC the aristocrat Peisistratos succeeded in usurping sole power in the violent conflicts between nobles and less privileged people.
After his death in 528/527 he was followed by his sons Hippias and Hipparchus.
To erect a monument to their regime, these Peisistratids began building a Temple of Zeus.
They were probably driven by other giant temples that colleagues built in Sicily and Asia Minor as “typical boastful tyrant structures” (Gehrke).
Above all, the huge Hera temple of Polycrates on Samos (r. 538-522) would fit in as a competing project.
The Heraion of Samos was founded around 530 BC.
Erected by the tyrant Polykrates
Source: picture alliance / akg / Bildarc
For this, a smaller church, which was probably built at the beginning of the 6th century, was demolished.
When Hipparchus fell victim to an attack in 514 and Hippias fled to the Persian Empire, the first Olympieion was not yet finished.
It is not even certain whether it was built in the Doric or Ionic order;
the few column drums that were used in later buildings have so far been interpreted in both directions.
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The democracy that established itself in Athens after the overthrow of the Peisistratids and soon rose to become the leading power in Greece, understandably had little interest in the tyrant monument: it was used as a quarry.
Until the 170s BC
Another sole ruler appeared, the aforementioned Antiochus IV. Epiphanes.
As king of the Seleucid Empire, Antiochus IV Epiphanes (ruled 175–164) was one of the most powerful rulers of his time
Source: Wikipedia / Jniemenmaa (talk) / CC BY-SA 3.0
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He had spent his youth in Rome as a hostage after his father had lost out with the legions, and lived in Athens from 178.
From there he won the throne of the Seleucid Empire in 175, which at that time still comprised Syria and large parts of Asia Minor, Palestine and Mesopotamia.
As a thank you and probably also to make himself popular in Greece, he took on the ruins of the giant temple and commissioned the Roman architect Cossutius to complete the construction.
He changed the concept slightly by reducing the number of columns on the long sides from 21 to 20 per row and making the capitals in Corinthian order.
He chose Pentelic marble as the building material.
Antiochus promoted the Zeus cult as an "integrating offer in his multi-ethnic empire", Gehrke puts the company in a larger context.
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The king even went so far as to rededicate the temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem as a sanctuary for Zeus.
The uprising of the Jewish Maccabees then brought him entries in the Old Testament.
In search of new sources of money he was killed in 164 on a looting train.
The Roman emperor Hadrian (r. 117-138) pursued an active building policy
Source: De Agostini via Getty Images
Again the Olympieion was left unfinished.
Even 150 years later, the full-bodied announcement of various client kings that they would finish building the temple at their own expense and dedicate it to the patron god of their emperor Augustus (r. 31 BC – 14 AD), as the historian Suetonius reports, did nothing to change this.
Another 120 years had to pass before a solution was finally found.
The Roman emperor Hadrian (r. 117-138) added the Olympieion to the list of numerous buildings with which he documented his concern for the welfare of the empire.
This time the Temple of Zeus was completed in 132 AD in the “City of Hadrian”, including a “worth seeing cult image, which in terms of size, apart from the colossi in Rhodes and Rome, is equally inferior to the other cult images, made of ivory and gold and with a view to it is well worked on to its size ”, as the Greek Pausanias reports.
In honor of their patron, the Athenians came up with something special, as they requested statues of the emperor from all their colonies, which they erected in the holy district, which with 205 by 129 meters also exceeded all dimensions.
This magnificent gate opened the "City of Hadrian" in Athens, with the Olympieion in the background
Source: picture-alliance / akg-images /
Of the 104 columns, which were drawn around the stella in double rows along the lengthways and rows of three on the fronts, only 16 have survived, one of which is overturned on the floor.
If individual column drums are to be removed and reinstalled for the restoration, that says a lot about the dimension of the work that the archaeologists have now undertaken.
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