The Odeon of Herodes Atticus: Seeing Through the Wall
There is a spot on the south slope of the Acropolis, still open to visitors today, where you would once have seen nothing at all. Just a long, curving wall of pale stone. No columns, no sculpture, not a single doorway. Only, if you listened closely, the sound of music escaping, thinned by distance and stone. Our newest TimeSpot puts you exactly there, in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, shortly after it was completed.
Opening the wall
For this reconstruction, we wanted to capture something more than the building itself, we wanted to capture the surprise of it. So rather than simply showing you the Odeon, the TimeSpot lets you open the wall in front of you. A slider on screen peels the stone back, and the view shifts to look straight down into the hall from above, as though the wall had turned to glass. It is a small piece of visual storytelling, but it recreates something real: from the path outside, ancient visitors would never have guessed at what stood behind that wall either.
Inside the hall
Open it, and you find five thousand people, by some counts more, packed into a steep bowl of white marble, more than thirty rows falling away towards the stage. Musicians play a flute and a kithara, and beside them stands something unexpected: the hydraulis, the water organ, developed by an engineer in Alexandria some four centuries earlier. It is the earliest keyboard instrument known to us, and the distant ancestor of every organ in every cathedral built since.
Above the audience, the ceiling is reconstructed with deep square panels, each set with a gilded rosette, built from cedar shipped from the mountains of Lebanon. Ancient writers describe it as fantastically expensive, and that is very much the point, its patron wanted it to be. But the real marvel is what is missing. Excavation has never found any trace of interior columns anywhere in the building, meaning the roof crossed the entire hall, or very nearly all of it, in one clear span. How that was achieved is still debated by engineers today, and no single explanation has won out. The nearby Odeion of Pericles, by contrast, needed roughly ninety columns to hold up its roof, blocking the view for a large part of its audience. Here, nobody's view was blocked at all.
A gift, or an atonement
The building was commissioned by Herodes Atticus, a Greek born Athenian from an immensely wealthy family who had also risen to the Roman consulship and personally tutored the future co-emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. He built it as a memorial to his wife, Regilla, a Roman noblewoman who had died the previous year, eight months pregnant, after being struck by one of his freedmen. Her brother, himself a Roman consul, accused Herodes of ordering the killing. Herodes was cleared, pointing to his own public mourning as proof of his innocence, though some at the time suspected that mourning was itself a performance. Whether the Odeon was born of grief, guilt, or both, is a question nobody settled then, and nobody can settle now.
What came after
The Odeon did not stand for long by ancient standards. In 267 CE, the Herulians sacked Athens and the roof burned. It was never rebuilt. The marble was stripped for later city defences, and the rest slowly disappeared underground, so thoroughly that later travellers mistook the ruin for a bridge. It was excavated in the nineteenth century and restored in the 1950s, and it hosts concerts again today, always under open sky. The roof, the most remarkable part of the whole building, never returned.
See it for yourself
The Odeon of Herodes Atticus is now in the TimeLens app. Stand at the same spot on the Acropolis slope, open the wall, and see what generations of Athenians walked straight past without ever knowing was there.
If you would like to follow our work and support more reconstructions like this, you can join us on Patreon. And if you represent a museum or heritage site, we would love to hear from you.
