Megalopolis: The Mega Post

Megalopolis is a town in Greece with a current population around 6,000, according to Wikipedia.  Not really all that 'mega', we felt.  I mean, I grew up in Stow, Ohio, which has about 35,000 people (and it's own Wikipedia page as well!) However, Megalopolis used to be worthy of the name.  To see why, you need to step back and take in the wide view of the place.  From orbit, say.  So, here's the Google Earth view of the ancient city, with a few landmarks given.  Of particular note is the river Ifios that goes through the town, separating the North and South halves.  We'll focus on the southern portion to begin with.



The south part of Megalopolis features the 'Ancient Theater' (built around 370 BC), which could seat 20,000, with a Bouleterion, called the 'Thersilion' after the guy who paid for it, in front of the stage.  What is a Bouleterion, you ask?  Why, it's essentially the place where Ancient Greek town meetings, and most debates/speeches, are held.  As the design below shows, the one at Megalopolis was arranged with oddly-spaced columns (the round dots) radiating from a central square where the speaker stood.  That way, each seat in the house had a clear sightline to the speaker:

Megalopolis Bouleterion

Having a well-organized Bouleterion (with a large stadium nearby) was vital to Megalopolis because it was the capital of the Arcadian league, also founded in 370 BC as a coalition of cities in the Peloponnese who wished primarily to defend themselves against Sparta.  Think NATO vs the USSR, or perhaps just the European members of NATO.  (Side note: the main city pushing this was Mantineia, for reasons that should be clear if you read Lauren's post on that city and check out the pictures.) Turns out the Arcadians had to ask for help when Sparta came calling (again in 370 BC, it was a busy year), going first to Athens (who turned them down on the grounds that they wanted a strong Sparta to keep Thebes in check) and then to Boetia, who agreed to help.  This was perhaps not a huge surprise, as the Boeotian army had already whacked the Spartans a year earlier (thus inspiring the cities near Sparta to form a league - this stuff all does make sense and should again drives home the point that people don't change. Of course, this plan didn't work forever and in 223 BC the Spartans destroyed the city as a political center more or less for good.)

Unfortunately, while the theatre is in a decent state, both sections of the south side are closed for 'reconstruction', expected to end in 2017.  Which means that the entire site is closed off, not that the Greek travel pages site mentions that.  We did get a few pictures from over the fence, though. In the rear you can see the theatre with a number of the lower seats still showing, and in the foreground you can see the remains of the Bouleterion.  Apparently, it was destroyed in antiquity, so I doubt the reconstruction is going to be able to do much.  The Google Earth shot makes it a bit clearer, once again showing how important it is to be far enough away for the shot..

But that's just the South part of the city! OK, so it happens to have the famous Thersilion Bouleterion and the (at times controversial) Theatre.  And I do mean controversial.  Back in 1891, this was hot stuff, even making the arts pages.  Check out this commentary, from the equivalent of Variety of the day:

A quarrel is a capital thing in a family, but, like all other good things, it should come to an end some time or other. There was a theatre built several hundred years BC, of which a good deal still remains to be quarrelled over; but we must say that we think it would show better taste if people just dropped the subject now. The theatre (or its ruins) is at Megalopolis; but it is quite a long time since there were any performances there - a thousand years, very likely. Probably the Megalopolitan Lord Chamberlain would insist on its being relicensed if they wanted to play the Agamemnon or the Seven Against Thebes there now; and, anyhow, we think Mr Gardner and Dr Dorpfeld might leave off squabbling about it in the highly respectable page of the Athenaeum. No doubt the point they are fighting over is one of supreme importance. Dr Dorpfeld says that the lower steps could not possibly, any more than the wall at the back, belong to the original structure, and Mr Gardner says contrariwise. But, after a thousand years or so, even a subject like this palls, unless, indeed, it is treated by Mr Rider Haggard; and Mr Gardner's obstinacy has actually brought a pretty girl into the controversy. Miss (or Mrs) Eugenie Sellers - we do not know her, but she must be pretty with that name - has only last week written a letter to say that Mr G. is a bold, bad man and has no right to chaff Dr D. about the scaenae frons when he makes such gross errors himself about the logeion. Eugenie even goes so far as to say some very cross things about certain Skenengebdude mentioned by Mr G. (Theatrical Gossip', The Era 11 July 1891.)

As a result, when driving around we had no problem finding many signs for these ruins, and then they had a parking lot, and of course the 'closed for renovations' sign.  So we took the shot shown above and moved on to Lykosura and Gortyna.

When we were driving back, however, we had to pass by Megalopolis and I happened to look over and see something on the right hand side of the road.  It was a huge area, surrounded by an ancient fence that had large sections missing and the gate was open. We couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a look.


Now, the weird thing about this site is that it's completely unmarked.  Fenced in (sort of), but with the gate open and absolutely no signs or indications of what it might be. Just a bunch of granite and marble, out in a wheat field, with a few sections mowed or weed-whacked but not many.  And when I say wheat field, I'm serious. Here are some columns just hanging out in a giant field.  This whole area was, we believe, the 'agora' of Megalopolis, where all of the town's activity really took place. Today, it's a giant field of grass.  For smaller sites, it's not at all unusual to have no fence, no descriptive plaques, and little to no signs.  But the north part of ancient Megalopolis is huge.  And apparently totally forgotten and incredibly hard to look up on the internet; I ended up having to go back to the original investigation done by the British School of Athens researcher E. A. Gardner in 1890-91 and working forward.  We start with a full view, turning once again to Google Earth, with labels on some of the bits that I think I understand:



The "Stoa of Philip" is gigantic, 160 meters long.  And here is where things get tricky, because when you're blogging largely based on Wikipedia entries or the equivalent, you tend to get single clear answers. When you're reading about the original excavations (one of the first done by the British School in Athens), and then following up with people who've cited that work, you get lots of different interpretations and explanations.  My favorite one is that the 'Philip' referred to here was Philip I, the father of Philip II and grandfather of Alexander the Great, and that he donated the funds to build it to help convince the Arcadian league to support his son, Philip II.  It's not a sure thing, however, and the number of different stories began to exceed what I could track down while in Greece.  Apparently the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard has a number of the original books on this (in their rare book section), so I may take a short road trip when I get home.  As you can see in these pictures, though, this is a high end site - multiple columns still standing, walls still up, etc. And yet totally abandoned.




Over on one side of the stoa is an exedra, a great word not used enough in daily conversation ("a room (as in a temple or house) in ancient Greece and Rome used for conversation and formed by an open or columned recess often semicircular in shape and furnished with seats.")  This I learned from reading the abstract to "The sanctuary of Zeus Soter at Megalopolis (by Ulrich-Walter Gans)" who noted 

New German-Greek excavations undertaken in 1991. The sanctuary was founded at the same time as the Stoa of Philippi in 340, both part of a vast urban planning program, for which Athenian sculptors were summoned. The annex against the north wall is not a propylon but an exedra. 

Here's what remains of it today (again, I think -- it's hard to be sure without a site plan, and nobody seems to have made one up):


Finally, we come to the last identified structure, the Temple of Zeus Soter (which means 'Zeus Savior').  This has begin to fall into the river, but the parts that haven't are in decent shape as 2400-year-old temples go.  There is more information to be had about the temple, but sadly not online.


Finally, we're left with some structures of unknown origin; there were quite of few of these, but I've been utterly unable to figure out what they were.