Those enormous columns standing in the field in front of you are what's left of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and one of them is lying down. Find that one, because it hasn't shattered — it's come apart into slices, a stack of marble discs end to end, like something knocked off a shelf. Walk its length and count them.
That's how they were built, and they were never carved from a single piece of stone. They were cut as drums at the quarry, hauled here, stacked, pinned through the middle, and the fluting was cut down the outside afterwards so the joins vanished. That one came down in a storm in eighteen fifty-two, and Athens has left it exactly where it fell for the better part of two centuries.
The standing ones are seventeen metres, which makes them the tallest columns on any Greek temple anywhere, and there were originally a hundred and four of them. There are fifteen.
And the reason it looks like this is that it took six hundred and thirty-eight years to build.
It starts in the six
th century before Christ with a tyrant. Peisistratos — say it pie-SIS-truh-tos — ran Athens with his sons, and the family wanted the largest temple in the Greek world. So they laid out a platform on a scale nobody had attempted. Then the tyranny was thrown out, the sons went into exile, and the work stopped dead with the platform finished and nothing on it.
Nobody picked it up again for three and
