Almost every tourist who has ever visited Athens has at some point thought about how amazing it would be if the city’s monuments were restored to how they looked when they were new in classical antiquity. A couple of months ago, the website UnHerd, which has right-wing and libertarian political leanings and specializes in what it calls “slow journalism,” published an essay by Nicholas Boys Smith titled “It’s time to rebuild ancient Athens,” in which Smith proposes that Greece should fully restore the Athenian agora (the ancient central market and meeting place of the city) to how it looked in antiquity. This is a fairly common sentiment, so I wanted to take this opportunity to address it.
In this post, I will discuss why restoring Athens’ ancient ruins to how they looked in antiquity hasn’t already happened in the way that many tourists like Smith have hoped and the problems that such a restoration would certainly entail. Most ancient historians and archaeologists do support the idea of restoration to some degree or another, but we also recognize that restoration must be balanced with other concerns.
Most of Athens’ major monuments have already been heavily restored
The very first thing I should point out is that many of the ancient structures of Athens have already been heavily reconstructed to an extent that most tourists do not realize. Smith in particular seems blithely unaware of the sheer extent of modern reconstruction that has taken place on the akropolis when he writes: “The Acropolis can remain white and fake and hard to visit, but we should perfectly rebuild the Agora.”
The fact of the matter is that, over the past century and a half, every building on the Athenian akropolis has undergone extensive modern restoration, especially over the past fifty years. If you look at illustrations and photos of the akropolis monuments that were made in the nineteenth century, you will see that they were all in far worse shape back then than they are today. The Parthenon had far fewer standing columns than it has today, the entablature was collapsed on the north side, the south side was basically completely demolished, and there was a mosque built in the center of it.
ABOVE: Illustration by the Scottish traveler James Skene showing the Parthenon as it looked in 1838 right after Greece’s War for Independence
Meanwhile, Propylaia had no roof at all, only a few of its columns still had intact capitals, and a tower built by the Frankish Dutchy of Athens during its period of rule from 1205 and 1458 stood next to it.
ABOVE: Illustration by James Skene showing the Propylaia, the Frankish Tower, and Temple of Athena Nike as they looked in 1838
The Erechtheion at that time also had no roof, most of its walls were missing and it had a later structure built inside the north porch. The south porch was also missing one of its caryatids (the statues of maidens serving as columns), which the British earl Lord Elgin had removed at the beginning of the nineteenth century and taken to England. A crude and ugly pillar of bricks took the caryatid’s place in supporting the structure.
ABOVE: Illustration by James Skene of the east side of the Erechtheion as it looked in 1841
ABOVE: Photograph of the west side of the Erechtheion taken by the French scholar Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey in 1842. Notice the missing caryatid.
The earliest phase of restoration on the akropolis monuments began in the later nineteenth century, but more recent phases have carried the work much further. In the half century since the fall of the junta and the establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic in 1974, Greece has become more popular as a destination for international tourism and, to make the akropolis more attractive to tourists, the Greek government has funded extensive reconstruction on its ancient buildings. The current phase of reconstruction began in the 1970s, is still ongoing, and will continue for the foreseeable future.
A large proportion of what one sees when visiting the akropolis today is the result of decades of extremely expensive and labor-intensive restoration. For instance, none of the maiden columns that one currently sees on the Erechtheion are the ancient originals; all six are exact replicas made in the twentieth century. Five of the originals are now in the Akropolis Museum in Athens and one (the same one Lord Elgin removed) is in the British Museum in London.
ABOVE: Photo I took showing the maiden columns on the Erechtheion, all of which are modern replicas
ABOVE: Five of the six original maiden columns from the Erechtheion on display in the Akropolis Museum
Funds: where to get them and what to do with them
The first reason why Greece hasn’t fully rebuilt all its monuments is money. To understand this, it is worth discussing how expensive these monuments were to build in the first place, where the money to build them came from, and the special challenges that make reconstructing them if anything even more expensive.
In 480 BCE, the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Xerxes I invaded Greece, captured Athens, and razed the akropolis, destroying all the monuments that had previously graced it. An alliance of Greek city-states successfully drove out the Persians through their victory in the Battle of Salamis that year followed by victories at Plataia and Mykale the next year, but the damage to Athenian infrastructure had already been done.
In 478 BCE, Athens and a large number of other Greek city-states formed an alliance known as the Delian League under Athens’ leadership. The original purpose of this alliance was to attack the Persians on their own territory to avenge the destruction Xerxes’s invasion had caused in Greece, to facilitate to allocation of spoils, and (implicitly) to defend Greece if the Persians ever tried to invade again. Over time, however, this “alliance” evolved into something more like a network of vassal states that all paid tribute to Athens.
As a result of its control of the Delian League, by the middle of the fifth century BCE, Athens reached the pinnacle of its wealth and power. For three decades, the Athenians had left their akropolis bare, but then the politician and general Perikles (lived c. 495 – 429 BCE) proposed a massive series of building projects to rebuild the akropolis grander and more impressive than ever and to beautify the city. The Parthenon, the Erechtheion, the Propylaia, the Temple of Athena Nike, and the Temple of Hephaistos in the agora were all originally constructed during this period as part of this massive public building program.
Even though the construction of all these monuments made extensive use of slave labor, building them was still absolutely staggeringly expensive. The first year of construction on the Parthenon alone is estimated to have cost some 5,000 talents, equivalent to at least three billion U.S. dollars today.
Although modern people still marvel at the public temples and monuments of Classical Athens, one could easily argue that the building of these monuments was an injudicious use of public funds. After all, Athens put the vast majority of its public revenue into building them at a time when the city lacked amenities such as sewers or garbage disposal. (At the time, the city had only cesspits instead of proper sewers and garbage and human waste were frequently just dumped in the streets.)
Instead of building the Parthenon, Athens could have invested in a real sewer system and better public sanitation, which might have had the effect of preventing or at least alleviating the infamous plague that devastated the city in 430 BCE. Modern scholars have identified the bacterium that caused this plague as one closely related to the one which causes typhoid fever, which is primarily spread through drinking water or food that has become contaminated through contact with an infected person’s urine or feces, or by eating or touching one’s face after one’s own hands have become infected without washing them.
Unsurprisingly, restoring the akropolis in modern times has also been phenomenally expensive. If anything, the monuments are even more challenging and expensive to restore than they originally were to build. A huge part of the challenge is rebuilding the monuments while also preserving all the original stone. This may sound easy, but it is actually extremely complicated, due in part to the fact that many of the original stones are fragmented into pieces with rough and uneven sides and all new stones must be able to fit to them exactly.
To solve this problem, Greece has employed specialist stone carvers to meticulously carve every block into the perfect shape using highly sophisticated, time-and-resource-consuming techniques. Greece has only invested this amount of money and resources into the project because the akropolis is such a huge tourist attraction and is so important to Greece’s economy that they know maintaining and restoring it will ultimately pay off in the long term.
ABOVE: Photo I took last summer showing the restoration on the Parthenon up close. The darker, beige-colored marble is ancient, while all the lighter, white-colored marble is modern. Notice how much of the visible stone is modern. Also notice how precisely the modern stone fits together with the ancient stone.
Rebuilding the entire ancient agora of Athens as it was in antiquity would be a vastly more ambitious project than simply restoring the Parthenon and it would almost certainly cost many billions, if not trillions of euros. Although the Greek economy has recovered considerably from the economic crisis a decade ago, Greece still does not have mountains of unlimited cash and the Greek government has to decide what to spend the money it has on. It would be irresponsible for the Greek government to spend massive amounts of money on rebuilding entire ancient sites for the primary benefit of tourists when that money could go toward benefiting the country’s actual citizens.
Even when it comes to funds that have already been allocated for ancient cultural heritage, the handlers of such funds have to decide whether to prioritize conservation or restoration, which are two different things. Restoration is the reconstruction of ancient buildings or monuments that have collapsed or been destroyed, whereas conservation is the maintaining of already-existing ancient structures. Although most tourists don’t realize it, simply maintaining already-standing monuments is already quite expensive, even without any reconstruction.
To further complicate this issue, the vast majority of tourists who go to Greece only visit a small handful of well-known sites (mostly the akropolis, the agora, Delphi, Meteora, Corinth, Mycenae, Epidauros, Olympia, and Knossos) and the vast majority of conservation funding and effort goes to these few sites, while other sites that tourists rarely visit are often sorely neglected.
When I was in Greece last summer, I saw first-hand how the ruins at many less popular sites such as Mantineia, Megalopolis, Mount Lykaion, Bassai, Messene, Gla, Olynthos, Amphipolis, and so many others are overgrown with grass and weeds, unprotected, and actively crumbling or eroding away. Many of the ruins at the sanctuary of Dion near Mount Olympos are not only overgrown, but partly underwater most of the year due to flooding.
Any funds that might be used to rebuild monuments could instead be used to preserve the ancient ruins and monuments that Greece already has. It would be a shame to invest billions of euros to fully rebuild the agora using mostly modern materials while allowing erosion to slowly destroy actual ancient ruins at so many other sites.
ABOVE: Photo I took last summer of the Temple of Isis at Dion, which is overgrown and literally swamped most of the year
Restore it to how it looked in which era?
Money, however, is not the only problem with the suggestion of fully restoring the agora. An unspoken assumption behind Smith’s essay is that the agora should be restored specifically to how it looked in the Classical Period of the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Many of the buildings in the ancient agora, however, were built later than the Classical Period and, in some cases, on top of the remains of older structures.
For instance, the Stoa of Attalos (the only building in the agora that has been fully restored to how it looked in antiquity) was built in the second century BCE during the Hellenistic Period. Other buildings, such as the Odeon of Agrippa and the Library of Hadrian, date even later, to the Roman imperial period.
Based on this, some may argue that we should restore the agora to how it looked in the Roman imperial period—but, by that time, many of the monuments from the Classical Period had already been destroyed or were in ruins! Thus, any attempt at a full restoration of the agora would be ahistorical in the sense that the reconstructed agora would not accurately represent how it really looked at any point in antiquity.
Reconstruction: restoring or erasing history?
In a certain sense, reconstruction brings back history because it allows people to better appreciate what ancient structures looked like when they were new, but it also necessarily erases history because the changes that people and natural forces have made to ancient sites since antiquity, including the damage, are themselves an integral part of the sites’ history. Reconstruction that undoes these changes effectively makes this rich history less visible.
I mentioned earlier that, two hundred years ago, a tower built by the Frankish Dutchy of Athens in the Late Middle Ages stood on the akropolis next to the Propylaia. In 1875, however, the German businessman and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann provided funding to have this tower—which had stood on the akropolis for over half a millennium—demolished so that the akropolis would look closer to how it did in classical antiquity.
ABOVE: Photograph taken in 1874 showing the Frankish Tower on the akropolis next the Propylaia around a year before its demolition
Much later, between 1931 and 1939, the Greek government expropriated the land of the neighborhood of Vrysaki, which was one of the most densely populated neighborhoods of central Athens, filled with modern historic buildings, and gave the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) permission to demolish the entire neighborhood so that they could excavate the ancient agora, which was buried underneath it. To this day, the wholesale demolition of Vrysaki remains highly controversial.
Any effort to fully restore the agora to how it looked in antiquity would inevitably encounter similar problems of destroying or covering up later history. For instance, the Temple of Hephaistos in the agora was originally constructed as a temple to Hephaistos, the Greek god of craftsmen, from 449 to 415 BCE. It served this purpose until the closing of pagan temples in the fourth century CE. Later, though, in the seventh century CE, Christians added an apse on the eastern end of the temple and converted it into a church dedicated to Saint Georgios Akamates. It remained in continuous use as a church until 1833 and served as a church for longer than it served as a pagan temple.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many non-Orthodox westerners were buried in the Hephaisteion and inscriptions were left on the interior walls recording the names of those who were entombed there, which are still legible today.
ABOVE: Photo I took last summer of inscriptions on the interior walls of the Temple of Hephaistos recording eighteenth- and early nineteen-century burials in the temple
ABOVE: More inscriptions inside the temple
In 1834, under the order of King Otto I of Greece, the building was converted into Greece’s first national museum. It served this function for a hundred years until 1934 when it was converted into a monument and archaeological site, which it remains to this day.
If someone were to restore the Temple of Hephaistos to how it looked when it was new in the fifth century BCE or even to how it looked in the Roman imperial period, this would most likely mean filling in the opening where the apse was, covering up the post-antique inscriptions inside, and effectively hiding all physical reminders of its post-antique use as a church and museum. It would effectively be like pretending that those over thirteen centuries of the building’s history never happened.
ABOVE: The Entry of King Otto of Greece in Athens, painted in 1839 by the German painter Peter von Hess, showing Otto I, the first modern king of Greece, arriving in the city in front of the Temple of Hephaistos with the akropolis in the background
The problem of accurate reconstruction
Finally, there is enormous uncertainty about what many of the buildings and structures in the ancient agora actually looked like when they were new. The majority of the buildings survive only as foundation blocks and a lot of what we think we “know” about how they originally looked involves a heavy element of informed guesswork. A new discovery at any time could force us to revise our understanding.
Once a building or monument has been reconstructed, however, most people will assume that the reconstruction is accurate, even if it is uncertain whether the building really looked that way or the reconstruction is known to be flat-out wrong.
Why and how the Stoa of Attalos was fully reconstructed
As I mentioned earlier, there is one building in the ancient agora that has been fully reconstructed, which is the Stoa of Attalos. The rebuilding of this stoa, however, was the result of a perfect storm of numerous archaeological, practical, and geopolitical factors that came together all at once.
King Attalos II of Pergamon commissioned the stoa bearing his name as a gift to the city of Athens in the mid-second century BCE. It originally served as essentially an ancient strip mall: a long, covered and columned walkway full of little shops. The stoa remained in use for this purpose until 267 CE when the Heruli, a Germanic people from north of the Roman border, sacked Athens.
Following the Heruli’s sack, the people of Athens incorporated the north end of the stoa into a defensive wall meant to protect the city. In the centuries after this, people removed stones from the buildings in the agora and reused them for other purposes, but, because the north end of the building was incorporated into the city wall, people left that part alone and, as a result, it was preserved all the way up to its original height.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the north side of the Stoa of Attalos, which was incorporated into the post-Herulian city wall and consequently preserved
The ASCSA began excavating the ancient agora of Athens in 1934 and, by 1948, they had excavated a large portion of it. In the course of these excavations, they had dug up an enormous quantity of ancient artifacts and artworks, but they had no permanent place to store all of it. As such, they needed to build a storehouse and museum to house and display everything they had found, but, because the agora was in the middle of Athens surrounded by buildings, there wasn’t much space available in the vicinity, which meant the museum had to be in the agora itself. The problem was that there wasn’t much space in the agora either, because it was full of ancient ruins.
As a solution to this problem, the archaeologist Mabel Lang jokingly suggested that they reconstruct the Stoa of Attalos and use it as a museum to house the artifacts. Even though she meant it as a joke, Homer Thompson, the director of the agora excavations at the time, decided that it was actually a great idea.
They chose the Stoa of Attalos because it was a very large building—large enough to hold the artifacts they wanted to display—and, because the north side was preserved up to its original height, they had a very clear idea of what it originally looked like and were confident in their ability to reconstruct it exactly how it originally looked.
It just so happened that, at this time, Greece, which had recently been devastated by World War II, was in the midst of a civil war between the established pro-western, pro-capitalist government of the Kingdom of Greece and various communist rebel forces. The United States was heavily invested in stopping the spread of communism in eastern Europe. In 1948, the very same year in which Thompson decided to rebuild the Stoa of Attalos, President Harry S. Truman pledged U.S. support to Greece to suppress the communist forces.
The Kingdom of Greece defeated the communist insurgents in 1949 and joined NATO alongside Turkey in 1952. The U.S. viewed Greece and Turkey, which were the only NATO member countries in eastern Europe at the time, as key allies in the Cold War. Consequently, the U.S. had a strong national interest in courting the favor and goodwill of the Greek people and promoting support for western capitalist democracy.
Because the ancient agora was the central market, meeting place, and political center of democratic Athens and the Stoa of Attalos itself was basically an ancient strip mall, it was easy to spin it as a symbol of democracy and capitalism (even though the stoa itself was actually built several centuries after the heyday of Athenian democracy had ended).
On top of all this, Homer Thompson was highly charismatic and had an extraordinary talent for convincing wealthy Americans to donate money. As a result, he was able to persuade wealthy U.S. backers to donate all the funding that the ASCSA needed to completely rebuild the stoa; the largest single donor was John D. Rockefeller Jr., who donated one million U.S. dollars toward the project (the equivalent of over eleven million U.S. dollars in 2024).
Thus, a whole host of factors came together to make the reconstruction of the Stoa of Attalos possible: an ancient building that was well enough preserved for archaeologists to know with a high degree of confidence what it originally looked like, a pressing practical need for a new building to house the artifacts the ASCSA had excavated, a geopolitical impetus for wealthy American entrepreneurs to contribute to the cause, and a highly charismatic frontman for the whole project. The rebuilding of the stoa was only possible because all these factors happened to coincide; if even one of these factors had been absent, the reconstruction would not have been possible.
The mistake of the lion spouts
In rebuilding the stoa, the ASCSA placed a high priority on making it look as close as possible to how it did when it was first built in antiquity, even quarrying the stones from the same locations as the originals. Despite all the care they put into it, however, they still made one significant error in their reconstruction.
The drain spouts on the roof of the stoa are shaped like lion faces and they are designed for the water to pour out of the lions’ open mouths. On the original building, these lions had tongues to direct the water in a steady stream, but, at the time when the ASCSA was rebuilding the stoa, they didn’t realize this and didn’t give the lions on the reconstructed stoa tongues. As a result, instead of spouting water elegantly, they drool.
This example shows how, even under the best conditions, when a building has substantial well-preserved portions and architects take scrupulous care to rebuild it as accurately as possible relying on the best archaeological evidence available to them, they can still get things wrong.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the reconstructed drain spouts on the Stoa of Attalos. On the original ancient stoa, these lions had tongues to direct the flow of the water.
Conclusion
Although Smith’s essay focuses specifically on the Athenian agora, the issues I have discussed here are equally applicable to the proposed complete reconstruction of any ancient site, including the akropolis, Delphi, Olympia, Corinth, or anywhere else. Quite simply, the lack of unlimited funds, the fact that sites contain buildings of different historical periods that were never new at the same time, the fact that reconstruction tends to erase or hide the post-antique history of sites, and the uncertainty of knowing what many ancient buildings (especially those that are less well preserved) really looked like when they were new stand in the way of grand proposals to fully rebuild such sites.
Those who wish they could see the akropolis, the agora, Delphi, or any other ancient site as it looked when it was new, however, should not entirely despair. Restoration is happening at many ancient sites where funding for it exists (including at the akropolis, the agora, and Delphi) and it will continue to happen for the foreseeable future; it is simply much more cautious and less sweeping than certain enthusiasts would advocate. Modern restoration generally tries to give visitors an impression of what buildings would have looked like when they were new without blowing the budget or obscuring the buildings’ later history.
I very much support ongoing reconstruction and restoration efforts wherever they can be justified and financed. Why not recreate the Delian League in part and levy a hefty tax on these cruise ships and such that take advantage of Greek tourism by overloading on some of these prime destination locations?
What I most want to see are reconstructions of the gigantic Athena Promachos (?) bronze statue that sat atop the Akropolis (not to be confused with Pheidias’ chryselephantine statue inside the Parthenon) and — to get really ambitious — the Colossus of Rhodes!
Yes, it would be awesome if Greece made a new Athena Promachos and installed it on the akropolis or a new Colossus of Rhodes and installed next to the Rhodian harbor, but those projects would also be massively expensive and Greece doesn’t really have the money for them right now. If they were to recreate those sculptures, they would also have to use real bronze and get very top-notch sculptors to make them look truly spectacular. The last thing they should want to do is soil the ancient sites with anything that looks cheap or kitschy. (I’m thinking in particular of the famously ugly plaster-and-fiberglass reconstruction of the Athena Parthenos in the Nashville Parthenon.)
There were news stories back in 2016 about plans to build a new Colossus of Rhodes, but those plans clearly never got off the ground.
Agreed, but I would think that the expense could be managed by modern fund-raising techniques and levies on tourism. What else does Greece waste public money on that could be more sensibly spent on restoring the ancient monuments and sights that people will still flock to see? These things would pay for themselves via increased tourist spending.
Perhaps the solution is to create digital models of ancient structures that could be viewed using virtual reality.
People have made those! For instance, here is a YouTube video that gives a tour of a digital reconstruction of what the buildings of Athens would have looked like in the fifth century BCE. Viewing a digital model of an ancient building, though, is obviously very different from viewing the real thing in person.
A very good idea, which has already been done. The activities of the “Hellenic World” Culture Center and Museum (Address: Pireos 254, Tavros 177 78, Phone: 21 2254 8000 which is not far from the centre of Athens) , include virtual reality representations of ancient Greek cities and monuments.
Furthermore, the representation of ancient Athens includes a virtual stroll in the city and “timeline” displaying the evolution of it.
Then better hope someone’s great at knowing the minutia of historical detail AND computer animation.
wouldn’t building Replica (entirely new building) at walking distance, much cheaper and preserve history more ??
Building full-sized, physical, historically accurate replicas at a walking distance would also be extraordinarily expensive and, on top of that, there isn’t really space for those replicas at most sites, especially in Athens. The original agora itself covers the land area of an entire neighborhood and Athens is a densely populated city. At some sites, they do have scale models to illustrate what monuments would have looked like when they were new, but those are very different and much cheaper than full-sized replicas.
I just found this blog – in fact only this morning !!! What an interesting place to land on, especially by chance, and I have enjoyed reading some of the entries.
This particular piece on the Agora in Athens is very good reading and thank you for taking the time to write it. I was completely unaware of the tight linkage between international politics and archeology as it applies to the monuments in Greece. Frankly, though, I hope that we never try to rebuild the ruins of the ancient past. While allowing the visitors to sense the passage of time by visiting the ruins, we can use computer graphics to recreate what we believe today such structures looked like. When, as you note, our ‘reconstruction’ is wrong, we need only alter it digitally.
As I was reading, I thought about another site I sometimes look at where scholars and computer techies have recreated ancient Constantinople. You are very likely already be aware of it [ https://www.byzantium1200.com ]. It is no longer regularly updated, but it certainly gives one a good sense of what that city looked like many years ago, especially as most of the great Byzantine works of architecture will never be rebuilt in modern-day Istanbul.
Good luck with your novel !!!
Thank you for the compliments and well wishes!
Basically anything to do with Greek monuments also has to do with international politics and tourism, especially since most of the major archaeological sites have been primarily excavated and managed by foreign archaeological institutes and are most frequently visited by foreign tourists. The agora and Corinth are primarily excavated and managed by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA); Knossos, Sparta, and Palaikastro are primarily excavated by the British School at Athens (BSA); Delphi, Delos, Argos, and Malia are primarily excavated by the French School at Athens (EfA); Olympia and Tiryns are primarily excavated by the German Archaeological Institute at Athens (DAI); and Phaistos and Gortyn are primarily excavated by the Italian School of Archaeology in Athens (SAIA).
Thank you for yet another excellent article! I found your explanations regarding the challenges of reconstructing ancient monuments to be entertaining and highly informative.
Have you read either of the books by Eric H. Cline that discuss the Late Bronze Age collapse (“1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed”) or its aftermath (“After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations”)? While they are mostly Near East-centric, he does devote whole sections to Crete, Greece and Cyprus, albeit much earlier than the era where most of your interest seems to lie.
I always look forward with delight to your articles, and I wish you much success with your ongoing educational process.
I know it’s not always feasible or desired, but when it is possible, I actually like when buildings or structures from different time periods are all restored side by side, even if it’s not how the site would have looked to an observer in any one time period. When I visited the Hagia Sophia, I loved viewing the Christian artwork and mosaics alongside the Islamic calligraphic art, even though they weren’t visible at the same time when it was a church or a mosque (and sadly aren’t anymore since Erdogan converted it back into a mosque to appease his Islamist base). To me, seeing the layers of history all at once adds richness to the experience. Instead of trying to recreate one time period (like the Classical era) and ignore or erase the rest like Schliemann did, I think the best way to appreciate the past is to let the different eras coexist and let the change be part of the visitor experience.
Here I was thinking it was cost.
Cost is definitely a major part of it, but it’s not the whole story.
That Greek government needs some priorities set straight.
PS Mentioning Lord Elgin made me think of your Indiana Jones article: https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/04/indiana-jones-is-actually-a-villain/
For my part, I feel Jones is actually spot on accurate with older archaeologists of the 19th and mid 20th centuries and that the British Museum can satisfy their collection with replicas of the Elgin marbles and return them to stay in Athens forever as this article of yours displays: https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/10/31/stolen-artworks-in-museums/
Spencer, dare I ask how your novel’s going?
It’s coming along extremely well! I’m glad to see you asking about it because knowing that people are interested makes me feel more motivation to write.
A major part of the reason why I haven’t been posting as much lately is because I’ve been devoting most of the time that I normally would spend writing posts for this blog to writing the novel. My current draft is now over 52,000 words (155 pages). I’m going to have to cut or rewrite some of that, but I think I’m about halfway to a complete draft, I think.
Do you have any brief excerpts you could share?
I’m sorry, but I cannot release any excerpts publicly at this point. Once I have a complete draft, I will send digital copies to a few selected beta readers, who will provide feedback, and then I am planning to try to find an agent and get the book traditionally published. If I am unable to find an agent and/or a publisher who is willing to make an offer on it, then I will self-publish it. Whatever the case, I expect that this process will most likely take several years.
Another question: Spencer, your LinkedIn page says you were a consultant for a “big-budget Hollywood historical epic”; which one was it? (If you can’t say, that’s fine.)
I was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), which prohibits me from sharing details about the project, which is the main reason why I haven’t said any more about it publicly. I was a consultant to the original scriptwriter in the very early stages of writing for the film in question, but that was nearly three years ago, the scriptwriter I worked with is no longer on the project, and my understanding is that the film most likely isn’t going to be made at this point due to various factors. Even if the finished film does end up coming out, I doubt that it will include any of the aspects of the film I consulted on.
Ah, well. Maybe you’ll eventually do another one. You could get some publicity from something like that.
That was an interesting article!
As a much smaller scale reconstruction, has anyone suggested replacing the lion spouts with ones that do have tongues?
Also, to be a complete reconstruction, shouldn’t the decorative carvings on the Stoa be brightly painted?
I am not currently aware of any plans to add tongues to the lion spouts. It’s a small enough detail and they’ve been the way they are long enough that I doubt anyone feels a particularly compelling urge to spend the time and money to fix the mistake.
You are absolutely right that the decorative carvings on the stoa should be painted, but they aren’t. This may be partly due to fact that most classicists in the mid-twentieth century had an aesthetic preference for white marble over bright colors and partly due to the fact that we may not know which colors they were originally painted and they may have wanted to play things safe.