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...
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...
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...
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...
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...