The Beulé Gate (French pronunciation: [bœ'le]) is a fortified gate, constructed in the Roman period, leading to the Propylaia of the Acropolis of Athens. It was constructed almost entirely from repurposed materials (spolia) taken from the Choragic Monument of Nikias, a monument built in the fourth century BCE and demolished between the second and fourth centuries CE. The dedicatory inscription from Nikias's monument is still visible in the entablature of the Beulé Gate.
The gate was integrated into the Post-Herulian Wall, a late Roman fortification built around the Acropolis in the years following the city's sack by the Germanic Heruli people in 267 or early 268 CE. Its construction marked the beginning of a new phase in the Acropolis's use, in which it came to be seen more as a potential defensive position than in the religious terms that had marked its use in the classical period. During the medieval period, the gate was further fortified and closed off, before being built over with a bastion in Ottoman times.
The monument was discovered by the French archaeologist Charles Ernest Beulé in 1852, and excavated between 1852 and 1853. Its discovery was greeted enthusiastically in France among the scholarly community and the press, though archaeologists and Greek commentators criticised the aggressive means – particularly the use of explosives – by which Beulé had carried out the excavation. In modern times, the gate has served primarily as an exit for tourists from the Acropolis.
Description
The Beulé Gate is situated at the bottom of a monumental staircase, which led to the Propylaia approximately 37 m (120 ft) to the east. The staircase was constructed in the later first century CE, possibly at the instigation of the emperor Claudius (r. 41–54 CE). The gate includes two pylon-like towers, which project around 5 m (16 ft 5 in) from the structure. These towers are joined by walls to the terraces above, including that of the Temple of Athena Nike. The doorway is set into a marble wall and aligned with the main route through the Propylaia.
The gate is almost 23 m (80 ft) wide, with a central part around 7 m (20 ft) in both height and width. The area above the central doorway is decorated in the Doric order. It consists of an architrave in Pentelic marble, topped with marble metopes and triglyphs made from a variety of limestone known as poros stone. Above the metopes and triglyphs is a geison with mutules, itself topped with an attic. The doorway itself is 3.87 m (12 ft 8 in) high, 1.89 m (6 ft 2 in) wide at its base, and 1.73 m (5 ft 8 in) wide at the top. Within the doorway is a lintel added in the sixth century CE.
Entablature inscription
The inscription visible on the entablature was originally the dedicatory inscription of the Choragic Monument of Nikias, a structure built shortly after 320 BCE to commemorate the Athenian choregos Nikias and his victory in the choragic competitions of that year. As arranged on Nikias's monument, it reads as follows:
Νι[κ]ίας Νικοδήμου Ξυ[π]εταιὼν ἀνέθηκε νικήσας χορηγῶν Κεκροπίδι παίδων. Πανταλέων Σικυώνιο[ς] ηὔλει. ἆισμα· Ἐλπήνωρ Τιμοθέου· Νέ[αι]χμ[ο]ς ἦρχε.
Nikias, son of Nikodemos, of the deme of Xypete, set this up having won as choregos of the boys' chorus for Kekropis. Pantaleon of Sicyon played the aulos. The song performed was the Elpenor of Timotheos. Neaechmos was archon.
Nikias's monument was built in the form of a Greek temple in the Doric order, consisting of a square naos with a prostyle, hexastyle pronaos (that is, a front porch with a pediment and six columns). The inscription would originally have been placed across the architrave of Nikias's monument, and represents one of the latest such inscriptions from Hellenistic Athens. Under Demetrios of Phaleron, who governed Athens between 317 and 307 BCE, sumptuary laws to control aristocrats' ostentatious spending caused the construction of choragic monuments to cease. Throughout the remainder of the Hellenistic period, fashions in public art changed to favour statues of rulers and monumental buildings constructed by those rulers themselves.
Date
The gate's discoverer, Charles Ernest Beulé, erroneously believed the gate to have been the original entrance to the Acropolis. Later research, beginning with that of Paul Graindor in 1914, established it as belonging to the late Roman period (c. 284 – c. 476 CE), and most probably to the late third or early fourth centuries CE. Scholarly opinion remains divided as to precisely when in that period it was built.
The Beulé Gate is constructed almost entirely from marble pieces (spolia) taken from the Choragic Monument of Nikias. Nikias's monument was demolished at an uncertain date. In the 1880s, Wilhelm Dörpfeld suggested 161 CE, on the grounds of his belief that a foundation discovered underneath the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, constructed in that year, had originally belonged to the monument. In 1910, William Bell Dinsmoor disproved Dörpfeld's hypothesis by demonstrating that the Nikias monument had originally stood at the eastern end of the Stoa of Eumenes. Dinsmoor alternatively suggested that the demolition may have dated to the late third or early fourth centuries CE, a view since established as the scholarly consensus. More precise proposed dates for the gate's construction include the reign of the Roman emperor Valerian (r. 253–260 CE) and the period around the sacking of Athens by the Heruli in 267 or early 268 CE – either slightly before the sack or around ten years afterwards.
The Beulé Gate shows architectural similarities with the Post-Herulian Wall, such as the use of alternating courses of differently coloured marble. The Post-Herulian Wall was built around the Acropolis about two decades after the sack of 267 or 268. Although the gate's date is not absolutely certain, it is generally agreed that the demolition of the Choragic Monument of Nikias, the construction of the Post-Herulian Wall and the building of the Beulé Gate were approximately contemporary. Most modern scholars consider that the gate was built in the aftermath of the sack. Judith Binder has suggested that the gate may have been constructed by Dexippos, the Athenian general who successfully defended the Acropolis against the Heruli during their invasion.
A stone reused in the Ottoman fortifications of the Acropolis preserves an inscription commemorating Flavius Septimius Marcellinus for having constructed "the gateway to the Acropolis from his own resources". The inscription gives Marcellinus's rank as lamprotatos (Ancient Greek: λαμπρότατος), a title equivalent to the Latin clarissimus and customarily used, after the early second century CE, to refer to men of senatorial rank. It also identifies him as a former agonothetes (ἀγωνοθέτης), a title given in Roman Athens to the officials responsible for funding and organising religious festivals, including the Panathenaia, the Dionysia, and games in honour of the imperial family. The inscription has been dated to the mid-fourth century CE, after 325; it is generally, though not universally, assumed to be associated with the construction of the Beulé Gate.
History
The archaeologist and philologist Walter Miller suggested in 1893 that the gate may have been built to replace an older, now-lost gateway, which he hypothesised would have been less strongly fortified. The Beulé Gate is believed to have been intended to safeguard the approach leading to the Klepsydra, a spring on the Acropolis which provided it with a safe supply of water in case of siege.
During the demolition of the Choragic Monument of Nikias, some parts of the structure – the geisa – were numbered while still in situ, allowing them to be correctly reassembled within the gate. The Doric frieze of the Choragic Monument, built from limestone and marble, was reconstructed along the top of the Beulé Gate, though the architrave of the Choragic Monument, which originally formed a single horizontal beam, was divided into two parts, one above and one below the gate's frieze. Jeffrey M. Hurwit has described the re-use of the Choragic Monument as a "twice-told Classicism", since the original monument was itself modelled on the Propylaia, and so its re-use created architectural harmony between the Beulé Gate and the Propylaia to which it led.
Hurwit has called the construction of the gate a "turning point" in the Acropolis's history, suggesting that it represented a renewed emphasis on the Acropolis's role as a strategic fortification rather than as a religious sanctuary — making the site now "a fortress with temples". During the third or fourth century CE, a wooden roof was constructed along the gate's inner face; under the emperor Justinian (r. 527–565) another lintel was fitted to the gate's doorway, reducing its height. The gate remained the main entrance to the Acropolis during the Middle Byzantine period (c. 843 – c. 1261): during this time, another storey with a wooden roof was added to the whole structure, and a barrel vault, running from north to south, was constructed against the inner (eastern) side of the towers and the gate wall. Tasos Tanoulas has suggested that this work may have been carried out by Leo II, the Metropolitan of Athens between 1060 and 1069.
In 1204, after the Fourth Crusade, the Byzantine Empire was partitioned between Venice and the leaders of the crusade. Athens became the centre of the Duchy of Athens, a lordship initially held by the Burgundian aristocrat Othon de la Roche. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the city's Frankish rulers gradually refortified the Acropolis. The Beulé Gate was closed off during the reign of Othon's descendants, the de la Roche family, which lasted until 1308; a vaulted structure was also built in the gate's north tower to brace it during the same period. The medieval period also saw the closing off of the Propylaia, which was further reinforced with the Frankish Tower at an uncertain date.
The gate's previous role as an entrance to the Acropolis was taken over by the gate situated at the western foot of the large classical bastion on which the Temple of Athena Nike was built. The medieval notary Niccolò da Martoni, who visited Athens in February 1395, wrote an account suggesting that the Beulé Gate was still visible, though no longer used. At some point in the Ottoman period (1458–1827), the gate's towers were heightened and a bastion was constructed on top of it: this bastion was visible in drawings made by the British antiquary William Gell in 1801–1806. When Beulé excavated the bastion, he reported finding evidence that the gate had been damaged by gunpowder weapons before the bastion's construction. By the nineteenth century, knowledge of the gate's existence was lost.
Excavation
The gate is named for Charles Ernest Beulé, a member of the French School at Athens, who discovered the gate in 1852. The first of Athens's foreign schools of archaeology, the French School had been founded in 1846 with the aim of carrying out excavations and classical scholarship, as well as of enhancing French prestige, particularly vis-à-vis British archaeology. Beulé had joined the French School in 1849, and discovered the gate while excavating the approach to the Propylaia under the direction of Kyriakos Pittakis, the Greek Ephor General of Antiquities. The historian Jean-Michel Leniaud has called the excavation "the first of the great archaeological transformations" carried out on the Acropolis; Tanoulas describes it as the most important archaeological project of the mid-nineteenth century at the site.
The existence of a lower route to the Propylaia had become evident during the operations to clear and repair the monuments of the Acropolis following the end of the Greek War of Independence in 1829. In 1846, the architect and archaeologist Auguste Titeux began to reveal the staircase leading up to the Propylaia, but archaeologists did not generally consider that there had been a second gateway below it. Titeux died in 1846 with his work on the staircase unfinished: in 1850, Pittakis completed the work of clearing it and partially reconstructing the steps.
Pittakis enlisted Beulé to assist with the removal of medieval and modern structures from the rest of the Propylaia area in 1852. Beulé, against the prevailing scholarly opinion of his time, believed that Mnesikles, the architect of the Propylaia, had originally constructed a second gateway, and secured Pittakis's blessing as well as support from Alexandre de Forth-Rouen, the French ambassador to Greece, to investigate his hypothesis. On 16 May [O.S. 4 May], the excavators discovered more steps leading towards the gate, and by 29 May [O.S. 17 May] it had become clear that they had found the edge of a fortified wall around the Acropolis, and within it a gateway. The site was visited by King Otto and Queen Amalia of Greece, and the discovery made Beulé's scholarly reputation.