Stoa of Eumenes ΙΙ

This guide to the Stoa of Eumenes II in Athens opens around 160 BCE, when Eumenes the Second, the foreign king of Pergamon, sent his engineers to build Athens a covered walkway it never asked for, more than one hundred sixty meters long with sixty-four Doric columns outside and thirty-two more within, all cut from imported island marble. You'll hear how theatergoers from the neighboring Theater of Dionysus used it for shelter between acts, ducking past a small fountain on the path circling up toward the Acropolis. Then the guide turns to the third century, when Athens came under sudden threat and needed stone in a hurry.