The Agora of Athens: A Marketplace For Ideas

Alejandro Amenábar’s forthcoming big-budget movie Agora tells the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, the 4th century AD beauty and pioneering Greek astronomer-philosopher who was killed for her pagan beliefs. So why is it named after a crumbled old bunch of ruins in Athens, where ancient Greeks once traded figs, pickled fish and olive oil? Because the film seeks to use Hypatia’s story to explore the struggle between ideas and intolerance on the cusp of the Dark Ages. Despite its outwardly mundane function, the Agora of Athens was where intellectual and political debate was born.

As well as functioning as a trading locale – just as agoras did in cities across ancient Greece – it was also the place where the fundamental foundations on which all civilized societies have been built since were erected: philosophy, politics and democracy. Among the Agora of Athens’ hive of stalls a hotbed of debate, discussion and decision existed.  It was where Athenian citizens gathered for the free exchange of worldly ideas as much as wordly goods.

The Birth of Democracy in Classical Greece

Democracy as we understand it was of course a Greek creation – the name derives from combination of the Greek word for “the people” demos and “the state” kratos. About 2,500 years ago, around 507 or 508 BC, Athenian

nobleman Cleisthenes – credited by historians as “the father of democracy” – came up with an ingeniously simple plan to tackle tyranny and dissipate the power of controlling factions. He broke the Athenian city-state down into ten arbitrary tribes. 50 representatives were called from each to comprise a senate – or boule – numbering 500. This was, arguably, the first forum of democracy.

The concept was far from perfect, and could be subverted or openly challenged by anyone with the necessary guile or strength. But the basic concept of gathering roughly equal groups of elected representatives to discuss and to vote on matters relating to the greater good was at least established. A key element of this was system was debate, and Athenians needed a place to get together and have it out – that place was the Agora, a large square in the centre of Athens.

Used from around the 9th until the 7th century BC by free-born male land-owners and citizens of Athens to assemble for military service or to listen to decrees by the ruling elite, it was declared a public area in the reign of Solon in the 6th century BC. By the 2nd century BC the Agora had reached its final 30-acre rectangular form, and become the very core of Greek life, where Athenians on a daily basis traded, deliberated, bartered and voted.

“Lawsuits, beestings-puddings... myrtle, laws, indictments” – An Average Day in the Agora

The Agora of Athens was a place for upstanding citizens only: any Athenian who had avoided military service, disgraced themselves in battle or even mistreated their parents were barred from entering. The place was flanked on all sides by major civic buildings, from the Peristyle Court to the The Strategeion, the Mint and various temples. The Romans equivalent was The Forum.

Between these imposing, prestigious institutions, merchants kept stalls or shops amid colonnades (long rows of columns) to sell their goods and services – all from fruit and livestock to perfume, money-exchanging and even slaves. Elsewhere in the Agora of Athens, trading not tangibles but words, ideas and policies, moved great statesmen, philosophers, writers and orators – Pericles, Alcibiades, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Cleon, Plato, Aristides and Themistocles among them. Socrates practically lived there. “He was always on public view,” wrote historian Xenophon, one of the father of Western philosophy’s pupils, “for early in the morning he used to go to the walkways and gymnasia, to appear in the agora as it filled up, and to be present wherever he would meet with the most people.”

The comic poet Eubulus summed up the typically busy scene in the Agora: “You will find everything sold together in the same place at Athens,” he wrote, “figs, witnesses to summonses, bunches of grapes, turnips, pears, apples, givers of evidence, roses, medlars, porridge, honeycombs, chickpeas, lawsuits, beestings-puddings, myrtle, allotment machines, irises, lambs, water clocks, laws, indictments.” This history has been laid palpably bare by the best part of a century of excavations at the site in modern-day Athens.

Excavation and Legacy

For every horde of tourists that visits the Parthenon or the Acropolis in modern Athens, barely a handful will venture into the Agora of Athens. A large green and park-like expanse, strewn with minor ruins, it admittedly doesn’t look like much in the 21st century – after ceasing to function around 1,400 years ago, the square and its buildings decayed and eroded and became buried under successive layers of detritus. But it was the Agora that made many of Greek civilization’s other great achievements possible. Its re-discovery since 1931 has to be regarded among the 20th century’s great urban archaeological achievements.

The American School of Classical Studies have led the charge at the Agora of Athens for almost 80 years (that a team from the United States have shown such enthusiasm for the site is unsurprising, considering that country’s pride as the self-appointed modern protectors of democracy). It’s been a hugely expensive effort – with most of the funding has come from American philanthropists, such as John D. Rockefeller Jr and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation – mainly because 300 homes had to be demolished to access the site, and 5,000 people re-housed. But it was worth it, because archaeologists have found remarkable artefacts and remains there from across the Agora’s long history, among them the very tools of modern democracy in its earliest form.

4th century BC Athenian jurors ballots and terracotta ballot boxes have been dug up, as have kleroterions (lottery-style machines used to select citizens at random for public posts) and fragments of ostraca – basically bits of pottery on which Athenians would write the names of citizens that they believed had become too powerful and therefore needed to be exiled (Pericles, Aristides and Themistocles are among names marked on some of the pieces). 5th century BC pottery vials have also been found, in which strong drugs such as hemlock would have been contained, before being used to bump off anyone for whom it was decided by popular decree that ostracism was not sufficient punishment. Socrates was one individual who was condemned to such a fate in 399 BC, after it was decided that his teachings were corrupting the minds of young Athenians, indeed archaeologists claim that they’ve found a spot in the southwest corner of the Agora of Athens that fits the precise description of the great philosopher’s death in Plato’s Phaedo.

Not dissimilarly to Hypatia, Socrates was killed for his beliefs. Beliefs that, had the Agora of Athens not functioned as a breeding ground for democracy and philosophy, perhaps wouldn’t endure and thrive as they do today.

See our list of Top 10 Portrayals of Hypatia, or check out Ann's blog for more on Agora the movie.

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