Achaea

The Agora of the Italians, with a size of some 6,000 square meters, is situated prominently in the center of Delos, between the famous sanctuary of Apollo to the south and the Sacred Lake to the north. The design of the Agora centers on a vast court...

A grove of olive and laurel trees surrounding the Altar of the Twelve Gods in the Athenian Agora is mentioned in the late 1st century A.D. by the Roman writer Statius in his epic poem Thebaid (12.481-496). Excavations conducted there revealed the re...

In the 4th century B.C., the schools and gardens of the philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastos and Epicurus were built in the vicinity of the gymnasia in the suburbs of Athens. Like the gymnasia, these schools were held in especially high estee...

A Roman guest house of the 2nd century A.D., so-called Guest House I, was erected southeast of the Roman Kladeos baths of ca. 100 A.D. (Fig. 3, A on plan). The guest house had a peristyle courtyard with a water-filled channel surrounding a rectangul...

In the first third of the 3rd century A.D. another guest house, so-called Guest House II (B on plan), was built at Olympia, immediately east of and connected with Guest House I (see Fig. 1). Guest House II was almost certainly built to supplement Gu...

The three most famous gymnasia in Athens, situated outside the city in naturally well-watered and shady sanctuaries of pre-Classical date, were those in the suburbs. In the Academy there was a shrine of the hero Hekademos; the Lykeion had a sanctuar...

In the Late Hellenistic houses of Delos the impluvia of peristyle courtyards were usually paved, and rainwater falling into these courtyards was emptied as wastewater by sewers into nearby streets. However, in two large houses (Quarter of the Theate...

This house was built at the time of, and possibly for, the emperor Nero, who, on several occasions in the mid-1st century A.D., performed personally in the games at Olympia. To enable the construction of the building just south of the stadium, the e...

The inscriptions of the sanctuary of Apollo mention nearly 30 kepoi within the period of 433 B.C. to 156/155 B.C., which were either private or belonged to Apollo and were rented or leased. Most of these cannot be localized because they were named a...

This building southwest of the temple of Zeus was the largest guest house in the sanctuary at Olympia. The original Leonidaion, a gift of Leonidas from Naxos, was built shortly after 338 B.C. with a central courtyard. In the 2nd century A.D. the bui...

The most monumental building dedicated to education and intellectual pursuits in Athens was the so-called Library of Hadrian (Fig. 1). It consisted of four columned halls with exedrae at regular intervals on the north and south sides, and a library ...

Several houses with peristyle courtyards were built north of the Areopagus in the second half of the 4th century A.D. These have been interpreted as schools of the Neoplatonic philosophers in which the school directors lived and students were instru...

A large complex of the early 5th century A.D. in the southern part of the Agora on the site of the earlier Odeon of Agrippa generally has been interpreted as a late Roman gymnasion (“Gymnasion of the Giants”) (Fig. 1). Homer Thompson, however, propo...

In the Late Hellenistic houses of Delos the impluvia of peristyle courtyards were usually paved, and rainwater falling into these courtyards was emptied as wastewater by sewers into nearby streets. However, in two large houses (Quarter of the Theate...

In the Late Hellenistic houses of Delos the impluvia of peristyle courtyards were usually paved, and rainwater falling into these courtyards was emptied as wastewater by sewers into nearby streets. However, in two large houses (Quarter of the Theate...

A grove and shrine of Apollo in the mountaintop town of Kyrtones in Boeotia was visited by Pausanias in the 2nd century A.D. (9.24.4). There was also a natural spring at the site, next to which was a sanctuary of the Nymphs and a small grove of frui...

The Greeks in Homer’s Iliad sacrificed to Artemis at Aulis in Boeotia in the hopes of favorable winds to carry them from Greek shores to Troy (Il. 2.305-310). The late 5th century Athenian playwright, Euripides, made reference to the grove of Artemi...

Pausanias gave directions on how to reach the grove called Pyraia, located near the city of Sikyon (2.11.3). He did not reveal what kind of trees grew here, but the grove was sacred to Demeter and Persephone. In it both men and women held religious ...

The only indication that there was a garden at this sanctuary is a literary reference to a grove of cypress trees. According to Pausanias (2.13.3), this ancient sanctuary in the northeastern Peloponnese was located above the acropolis. The grove ass...

According to local legend, the Argive maiden, Hyrnetho, died in an ancestral struggle and was buried on this site (Pausanias, 2.28.6-7). The sanctuary lay in the midst of a grove of wild olive trees. Established law, even in Roman times, forbade any...

We know of a grove of trees in the precinct of the temple of Poseidon, thanks to Pausanias’ and Strabo’s descriptions of it in the early 1st and the later 2nd century A.D. (Strab. 8.6.22; Paus. 2.1.7). According to Pausanias, on one side of the prec...

According to Pausanias, the ancient city of Onchestos in Boeotia lay in ruins by the time he visited the site in the 2nd century A.D., but the shrine and statue of Poseidon Onchestios and the sacred grove survived (9.26.5). This, he says, was the gr...

The extensive sanctuary at which Panhellenic athletic games took place, was situated on the Alpheus river in groves of trees of ancient date. In early Greek mythology, the semi-divine Herakles was said to have planted trees in the sacred precinct, c...

The grove of trees at the temple of Zeus is known through Pausanias’ description of it (2.15.2) and from archaeological excavations in the temple precinct. Excavations in the 1970s uncovered 23 planting pits cut out of the living rock on the south s...

Pausanias mentioned a small grove of trees in the sanctuary of Zeus Philios that was in close proximity to the agora in Megalopolis (8.31.4-5). The grove was enclosed within a boundary wall. In the precinct were images of the goddesses Demeter and K...

Evidence for a temple grove on Aegina exists only in a literary reference. Pausanias (2.29.6) wrote that the shrine of Aiakos was surrounded by a grove of olive trees. Pausanias says that it had been there since ancient times, and a reference in 464...

On the western edge of the Athenian Agora on Kolonos hill was the Temple of Hephaistos, built in the second half of the 5th century B.C. Excavations in 1937 around the temple revealed numerous square planting pits cut into the living rock in the 3rd...

The circus of Roman Corinth was excavated in 1967-1968 in the so-called Gymnasium area to the north of the city. The eastern curved meta, a portion of the spina (a total of 19 meters in length; Max. W. 4.49 m.), and a series of hard-packed racecours...

An inscription found near Chaeronea and known only from a transcription records the dedication by Gallatis, the son of Pythion, probably some time during the first or second century, of a funerary monument to himself, his wife, his children, and who...

Several Roman houses in Athens make use of the remains of Classical and Hellenistic buildings, and, as far as we can tell, these houses generally had courtyards paved with marble chips, pebbles or tile set in mortar, rather than with gardens. One ho...

The tropaeum of Nicopolis, a monument celebrating the naval victory of Octavian over the joint forces of Anthony and Cleopatra at Actium, is situated on the so-called Sacred Hill of Apollo north of the ancient city. On this hill, according to ancien...

A large (20,000 sq. m.) villa on a small hill near the ancient site of Eua has been systematically excavated since the 1980s. Most of the discoveries, however, remain unpublished. Because the earliest remains date to the Flavian period and an inscri...