That long grey wall with the row of tall columns standing in front of it is the outside of Hadrian's Library. Count them — seven left of the original fourteen, standing clear of the wall with nothing on top. The marble is green-veined and had to be shipped in from an island. Behind that wall is a rectangle of open ground about the size of a football pitch. In the eighteen hundred years since it was built, that ground has been a library, a fortress, three churches, a shopping centre, a governor's house and an army barracks.
Hadrian was the Roman emperor who loved Greece more than Rome liked him to, and around the year one thirty-two he gave Athens this. A Greek travel writer called Pausanias came through a few decades later and wrote down what it looked like. A hundred columns of imported marble. Gilded and painted ceilings, walls faced in alabaster, statues standing in niches. It held something like seventeen thousand scrolls, in wooden cupboards set into the walls. It was the most ex
pensive building in Athens, and what it amounted to was a reading room with a garden and a pond in the middle.
He also had his name cut on the inner face of the gateway as well as the outer, so you read it walking in and again on the way out.
In two hundred and sixty-seven a raiding army called the Heruli came down through Greece and wrecked Athens. Ten years later the Athenians were rebuilding
