Erechtheion

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The Erechtheion is the irregular Ionic temple on the north side of the Athenian Acropolis, built in the closing years of the fifth century BCE to house the city’s most ancient cults under a single, asymmetrical roof. Its form is unlike any other Greek temple: split across two levels, with porches of different heights on three sides and no matching plan, it bends around the older holy things it was built to enclose rather than imposing a regular shape on them.

What it sheltered was older than the building by far. The principal cult was that of Athena Polias — Athena as guardian of the city — whose ancient olive- wood image was held to have fallen from the sky, and which received the new robe woven for it at the Panathenaic festival. Alongside her the temple held the cult of Poseidon-Erechtheus, fusing the sea-god with Erechtheus, a legendary early king of Athens said to have been raised by the goddess herself and worshipped as a hero. The Athenians pointed within the precinct to the physical tokens of the founding contest between the two gods: the salt spring, or “sea,” that Poseidon was said to have struck from the rock, and the sacred olive tree that Athena had made grow, the tree from which the city took its emblem. Whether these were understood as proofs or as signs is not something the surviving evidence settles; that they were shown, and shown here, is attested.

The temple is best known now for the Porch of the Maidens, where six draped female figures — the Caryatids — stand in place of columns to carry the entablature. Five of the originals are in the Acropolis Museum and one was removed to London in the early nineteenth century with the other Parthenon marbles; replicas hold the porch today. Construction belongs to the years around 421 to 406 BCE, interrupted by the Peloponnesian War, and the work is sometimes connected by ancient and modern writers to the building program that produced the neighboring Parthenon.

In later centuries the building served as a Christian church and, under Ottoman rule, was put to other uses, surviving in altered form. To the philosophical schools of late antiquity the Acropolis remained the sacred heart of a city that was still, for the Neoplatonists who taught in Athens, the home of the goddess of wisdom. The cults the Erechtheion housed reached back into a past the classical Athenians already regarded as immemorial, and it was that antiquity, more than any architectural order, that the strange shape of the building was raised to keep.

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