Emperor Hadrian, at the Athenians' request, has…
124 CE to 135 CE
Emperor Hadrian, at the Athenians' request, has their laws professionally redrafted, and he brings to completion the massive temple of Olympian Zeus that the Peisistratid tyrants had begun more than five centuries before.
This temple forms the chief ornament of the new eastern suburb of Athens, and Hadrian gives the area a monumental entrance through a gateway, the inscriptions on which proclaim, on one side, “This is the Athens of Theseus, the old city” and, on the other, “This is the city of Hadrian, not of Theseus.”
He creates the Panhellenion, a kind of provincial parliament to bind all the semiautonomous former city states across all Greece and Ionia (in Asia Minor).
Based at Athens, it gives equal representation to all Greek cities (and hereafter will play a conspicuous part in the history of Roman Greece).
Hadrian also gives his support to a building renaissance at the shrine of Delphi.
The impact of all this on Hadrian personally cannot be exaggerated.
Like Augustus before him, he is initiated into the Greek mystery religion at Eleusis, and, after the temple of Olympian Zeus is dedicated, he assumes the title Olympius.
Hadrian also builds a library, a gymnasium, and a pantheon (a sanctuary of all the gods). (His aqueduct, which brought water from the mountains to the north, will be reconditioned and today still serves the modern city.)
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