Book Athens Transfers to Philopappos Monument

The Philopappos Monument was built by the citizens of Athens and by Julia Balbilla, a poet and the sister of Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos, to honor the memory of a Roman senator and prince from the Kingdom of Commagene who had become so beloved by the Athenians that they granted him honorary citizenship. When Philopappos died in 116 AD, the city honored him with a monumental marble tomb in a location of extraordinary prominence directly opposite the Acropolis.

The monument itself is a two-story marble structure measuring approximately 9.8 by 9.3 meters at the base, built entirely from white Pentelic marble. The lower level features a relief sculpture depicting Philopappos as a Roman consul riding in ceremonial procession, the kind of portrait that commemorated status and achievement in the Roman world. The upper level originally held three seated statues representing Philopappos and his ancestors, flanked by Greek and Latin inscriptions recording his lineage and titles.

In antiquity, long before the monument existed, the hill was known as the Hill of the Muses, or Mouseion Hill, because it was believed to be the burial place of Musaeus, a mythical poet and seer and disciple of Orpheus. The ancient Greeks honored the spot as sacred to the Muses, the goddesses of poetry and the arts, giving it a sacred character that endures today even in its modern guise as a public park and archaeological site.

The monument itself has weathered two millennia of exposure to the Mediterranean sun and rain. Both of the statues on the upper level have lost their heads, and the reliefs show the wear of centuries. But enough survives to give a vivid sense of the quality of the original work and the skill of the craftsmen who carved it. The marble surface glows white against the green hillside, particularly at sunset, and the monument remains one of the most photographed archaeological sites in Athens precisely because of how striking it looks set against the city landscape.

The views from the top of Philopappos Hill are among the most sweeping available from any archaeological site in Athens. Looking east toward the Acropolis, the entire hilltop monument rises directly across the landscape with the whole of central Athens spreading out below. Looking south and west, you can see all the way to the sea, to Piraeus, and on clear days to the Saronic Islands of Salamina and Hydra. Looking north, the view encompasses the entire city center with the mountains in the distance. It is a vantage point that puts the entire archaeological landscape of Athens into a single visual frame.