What I can see

One of the greatest and most luxurious conservatories of antiquity, the third of the ancient city, after those of Pericles and Agrippas, it has a seating capacity of about 5,000 spectators. It was made from limestone, raw stones and was lined with marble, as we can see from the  marble benches of the semicircular auditorium and the orchestra’s marble plates on the floor. It has survived and is maintained in very good condition, partly because of its robust structure but also because following the destruction of Athens in 267 AD by the Heruli, who set fire to the odeon, among many other ancient buildings, it was incorporated in the later defensive wall of the city, which was at the time shrinking and in decline. Today, the auditorium of the odeon has been restored and is mainly used during the summer months for cultural and musical events. Watching a performance in this odeon, under the Parthenon, is a unique and exclusively Athenian experience.



 

What I can't see

We cannot see its stunning ceiling, constructed by using special innovative construction methods, coming from the bridge industry of that period, and its elaborate decoration. It was the largest and most impressive wooden roof of its time. The huge cedar beams lacked support which makes this configuration a construction achievement of the period. The conservatory was a donation of Herodes in honour of his late wife Rigilla. Herodes was an Athenian citizen and tycoon, so wealthy and powerful that he even gave loans to Roman emperors. His donations adorned many cities with magnificent buildings. The length of the stage’s wall was 90 metres, thus exceeding in size and height (28m.) even the Athens Concert Hall, which is the largest of its kind in modern Greece. This extravagant scale for such a small city in terms of population as was Roman Athens stands in contrast with the moderation of the classical monuments on top of the Acropolis. Another important element of this unique monument was its location. If one thinks about the monuments on the southern slope of the sacred Acropolis rock (the Dionysus Theatre, Odeon of Pericles, Stoa of Eumenes, Odeon of Herodes Atticus) one can understand that this site was the first instance of cluster zoning in the history of urban planning. What we have here is essentially a concentration of buildings of diverse cultural character, in an area specified for exactly this purpose by a State.

Bibliography