Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire int he Athenian Agora Submitted by John Vandenbergh Lewis B.Arch., University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona May, 1992 Submitted to the Department of Architecture in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Science in Architecture Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology June, 1995 John Vandenbergh Lewis, 1995. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part. I A A Signature of the Author Jo Vandenbergh Lewis Depa* ent of Architecture, May 12, 1995 Certified by IrP u Julian Beinarl Professor of Architecture I Accepted by I I Roy Strickland Chairman, Department of Architecture Committee on Graduate Students MASSACHUSETTS INSTJTUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUL 251995 4ROtd Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire int he Athenian Agora by John Vandenbergh Lewis Submitted to the Department of Architecture May 12, 1995 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science inA rchitecture Studies Abstract The various political regimes of ancient Athens established and legitimated their power through civic architecture and public rhetoric in the agora. A study of the parallel developments of architectural and rhetorical form, supported by previously published archaeological evidence and the well documented history of classical rhetoric, demonstrates that both served to propel democracy and, later, to euphemize the asymmetrical power structures of the Hellenistic and Roman empires. In addition, civic architecture and rhetoric worked in unison following analogous patterns of presentation in civic space. Civic imperial architecture in the agora may be thus understood to function as the stageset and legitimator of imperial political rhetoric in the agora. Thesis Advisor: Julian Beinart, Professor of Architecture and Planning Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire in the Athenian Agora Table of Contents Introduction 5 Words and Architecture 10 Rhetoric and the Architecture of the Agora 20 Pre-Classical Athens, 1450-500 BC 21 Classical Athens, 500-404Bc 35 Late Classical Athens, 404-323 BC 98 Hellenistic Athens, 322-31 BC 118 Roman Athens, 86 BC- AD 267 131 Conclusion 152 Afterword 154 Illustrations 156 Bibliography 179 Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire in the Athenian Agora Introduction Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire in the Athenian Agora Introduction were intimately associated in Athenian public life. Rhetoric was not simply the explicit means of propaganda and dispute, it was an evolving art that served to encourage or discourage various regimes through bodily presentation and personal accountability in public space. Likewise, the agora was not simply the public space of the city, it was an accumulation of monuments and buildings The Role of the Agora in designed to psychologically reinforce the Athenian Public Life. permanence of current regimes and to stand as evidence for or against the contentions of rhetoric. We are therefore uninterested in determining which of the two came first, The agora of Athens was the central meeting rhetoric or public space; their very place for the people of Athens, their interdependence suggests that one without marketplace, and the site of most of their the other is so altered as to become civic buildings. As such it was the crucible unrecognizable. The agora without rhetoric is for change and improvement in the arts and a marketplace. Rhetoric without the agora is in the politics of the city that was the cradle simple declamation. of Western civilization. However, perhaps due to its multiple roles as political, Thus is established the tripod of Greek commercial, and intellectual center of the politics: the regime, its speaking ancient city, the agora reveals a difficult, if participants, and the place for speech. All not unanswerable conundrum concerning the four regimes discussed in this paper can be origins of Athenian democracy: we do not characterized by particular, meaningful have sufficient evidence to determine which variations of the three constituent parts of came first, the agora as an open space or governance. This paper will refer to democracy as speaking in public. What we archaeology, surviving literature, and related do know is that in the agora there were modern studies to elucidate the various interdependent and parallel developments in parallel forms of rhetoric and civic the two preeminent means of expressing architecture in the agora, always with political will and power: public rhetoric and reference to politics and governance. In civic architecture. The art of argumentation chronological order the paper covers the and speech, rhetoric, and the art of enclosing following periods: pre-Classical tyranny, the and legitimating public activity, architecture, democratic and Hellenistic periods, and the Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire in the Athenian Agora Roman occupation to the Herulian sack of aristocracy was disrupted. Laws were written Athens in 267AD. and read to the public; civic institutions consisting of representatives of the Athenian Pre-Classical Athens was a slowly evolving tribes were established. The resulting warren of houses surrounding the palace of importance of literacy and public the tyrant. The tyrant survived by military participation in politics led inevitably to the strength and a code of suspicion. In such a Classical form of the agora: public speech political climate uncensored speech was was possible only if there was space for it; impossible, and public meetings except to the space was possible only if upheld by law receive the word of the tyrant by edict were and public institutions; and the institutions impossible. The speech of pre-democratic were the embodiment of public will as Athens was of only three permissible expressed in speech. The tripod was stable varieties: the tradition of orality and poetry and we cannot safely postulate a first, that served to perpetuate the mythology and pre-existing leg. The constitution of Solon, folk traditions of the culture, the workaday the agora as an open space surrounded by talk of private and commercial life, and the civic buildings, and the practice of public edicts of the tyrant. Political speech was speech were instituted simultaneously. The entirely in the mouth of the tyrant and his actual acceptance of the constitution after appointed archon. The rigid hierarchy of millennia of oligarchy, the actual pre-Classical society was starkly evinced by construction of the civic buildings, and the the relationships established between people actual common practice of public speech by by speech and the architecture of the city. a people unused to participation were Men were either governed or the governor. undoubtedly gradual; but the archaeological The governed put their bodies into the and historical evidence indicates that they architectural space of the palace, made were conceived simultaneously. They were, temporarily public, in order to hear but not to in fact, one body. speak. The beginnings of democracy were not The oral tradition of archaic Greece, long without setbacks. The constitution of Solon established as a highly sophisticated art form, was abolished by Pisistratos and a powerful may have contained the seeds of rhetoric, the aristocracy in 560, and the accompanying art of arguing and speaking. The seeds were institutions of public speech and civic agora not to sprout, however, until the advent of were shut down. The agora continued to uncensored speech among the members of function as a marketplace, but without the polis. Following the rise of the archon uncensored speech until the democratic Solon in 594 the dominance of the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508. The new, Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire in the Athenian Agora purely democratic constitution remained in maintain the democratic constitution and place as the foundation of government local control of the magistracies and courts. throughout the fifth century. Rhetoric and The sanctity of the agora as the place of civic architecture in the agora were, from democracy, however, was spoiled. Foreign then on, the means of political presentation kings and patrons poured money into civic in Athens. building projects that greatly aggrandized and beautified the agora but which The agora was a sloping, tree-shaded floor established men over other men. The surrounded by informal groupings of civic Athenians had resisted and prohibited and commercial buildings. The Philosophers monuments to individuals in the agora, and and their students sat in the stoas in small had specially avoided architectural groups and practiced dialogue, a carefully arrangements that allowed rhetors to sway constructed form of argumentation meant to the crowd. They recognized the find out the truth. Late in the century when incompatibility of patronage and democracy, there arose a need for a theater for meetings and feared that the axial, frontal architecture of the ever-growing Ekklesia one was of the Hellenistic speakers' platforms and constructed outside of the agora on the Pnyx, theaters would allow speakers to get undue not for reasons of topography, but apparently influence over the demos. The agora of the to separate that hierarchical form of oratory Hellenistic era was a place of oratory where from the democratic agora. Though archaic the Classical agora had been a place of Homer could conceive of a city as a group of dialogue. To make the new hierarchical form men without defensive walls or aggressive of rhetoric possible bemae were constructed ships, the Classical understanding of the city where flat floors had been. Theaters of Athens was dependent on architecture: accommodated foreign speakers who held the polis existed because there was rhetoric forth to large crowds of spectators whose in the agora. ability to participate and disagree was limited by the architecture. The appearance of Athens did not survive long as the capital of Hellenic democracy remained fairly intact an empire. She suffered numerous military but the actual form of governance was defeats at the end of the fifth century, insidiously misrepresented. Behind the emptied her treasury in efforts of war and apparently Hellenic civic architecture were diplomacy, suffered oligarchic revolts and private, aristocratic patrons, and behind the Spartan occupation, and finally succumbed artfully composed speeches of the rhetors to the Macedonians in 323. By pleading a was a system of class distinction, oligarchy, glorious past Athens won the favor of the and foreign political dominance. Rhetoric Hellenistic monarchs and was allowed to and architecture comprised the gilt, Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire in the Athenian Agora two-edged sword of Macedon's campaign to perpetrator of unequal society. It was euphemize the asymmetrical distribution of certainly joined in this task by the power in the Empire. architecture of the agora that served as such an impressive and legitimating backdrop for Later, during the occupation of Philhellene oratory. Rome, the Imperial tactics of Hellenistic Athens were perfected and continued. Rome Civic architecture and rhetoric in the agora, continued the practice of private Imperial through many transformations of form and patronage, but with explicit Imperial aims. means of presentation, were the tools of The Romans were well practiced in an politics in ancient Athens. They served architecture of persuasion: the Empire was democracy briefly but otherwise perpetuated established by urbanizing conquered inequality. populations and reminding them of the might of the Empire by constructing monuments This is primarily a synthesis of generally ac- designed to overawe. The scale of the Roman cepted, though heretofore discrete, theories of archaeology, architecture, and the history projects in Athens exceeded anything of rhetoric and politics. I consider the con- previously seen in the city. The Odeion of clusions my own, but am indebted to the Agrippa, built in the middle of the agora in a carefulness of many whose work precedes symbolic gesture of sub corona, dominated my own. In particular, the compilers of the the ancient city and established the political vast literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence of the Athenian agora, among primacy of Rome. All visual axes into the them R.E. Wycherley, Homer A. agora were terminated with temples and Thompson, J.B. Ward-Perkins, John M. other monumental structures. New speakers' Camp, and John Travlos, have provided me platforms and theaters were built, and a new with an elegantly researched foundation for this study. I have relied upon The Oxford form of political oratory was performed. History of the Classical World and other Foreign speakers, fluent in Greek and highly volumes of general political history for the trained in the art of self-presentation, stood background history that accompanies each in front of and above the silent, chapter. For the history of public rhetoric I non-participating crowds. The rhetoric was acknowledge A.N.W. Saunders, Maud Gleason, and Ian Worthington's collection carefully and expressly designed to of essays. I have been motivated by Hannah perpetuate class distinctions and to propagate Arendt's and Richard Sennett's insightful the political ideals of the educated readings of Greek public life. I am espe- aristocracy. Form triumphed over content as cially grateful to Professor Julian Beinart for his guidance and encouragement, and to Plato feared it would, and, therefore, rhetoric Professors Michael Dennis, Lawrence Vale, ceased to function as a tool of democracy; it and Stanford Anderson who have read and became instead an arriere-garde,a criticized the manuscript. I thank you. Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire in the Athenian Agora 1. Words and Architecture Rhetoric and the Architecture of Empire in the Athenian Agora Words and Architecture the 'presence of other human beings'. But what is the form of the 'manmade things', the architecture of the public realm that we can never leave or transcend? The ancient Athenians understood that the public realm of the city was simultaneously a product of the public condition of men and the shaper of that condition; the cause and the product of publicness. As such, the public space of a "The vita activa, human life in so far as it is city can be understood as the crucible of actively engaged in doing something, is al- culture, as opposed to nature; the place in ways rooted in a world of men and of man- made things which it never leaves or which the accumulated accomplishments of altogether transcends. Things and men form mankind are probed, reconceived, the environment for each of man's activi- questioned, even overturned. It is the place ties, which would be pointless without such of words,2 beyond which there is nothing location; yet this environment, the world 3 conceivable. into which we are born, would not exist without the human activity which produced it, as in the case of fabricated things; which As the place of words, the structure and takes care of it, as in the case of cultivated arrangement of the public realm in the land; or which establishes its through or- classical world was a product of and ganization, as in the case of the body poli- generator of modes of verbal articulation. tic. No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible The manner and means of speaking, without a world which directly or indirectly discussing, and, occasionally, writing, were testifies to the presence of other human evident in the architecture that beings."' accommodated speaking, discussion, and reading. That architecture, the agoras of So writes Hannah Arendt as the introduction Greece and the fora of the Roman Empire, to her first essay in The Human Condition. had certain formal characteristics, the She thereby establishes the central reason, or meanings of which are revealed in the light generative idea, of public architecture. The of a study of rhetoric, the art of public civic structure of any place of human speaking. But, if tradition, religious habitation, and primarily of the city, attests to Arendt, 1958, p.22 2 Ibid., p.26 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1142a25 and 1178a6, Plato, Phaedrus,2 49E-250D. I write here of the possibilities of political life, not individual life in which the limits of words and culture were believed to be transcendable through contemplation. In the Phaedrus Plato discusses the reality of the soul and its premortal knowledge of what he called the Ideas, the higher realities of which the things of the world are mere reflections. The Ideas cannot be perceived through the senses; only through contemplation and the correct use of dialogue.