Pergamon: Attalid Building, Art and Learning in a Hellenistic Capital

From 282 BCE, when Philetaerus established independent rule at Pergamon, until the bequest of the kingdom to Rome in 133 BCE, the Attalid rulers turned the city into a capital of the Hellenistic world. Pergamon stood inland in northwestern Anatolia, on a steep ridge above the Caicus valley. Its narrow summit and sharp slopes made building difficult, but also gave the rulers a dramatic setting for palaces, temples, public spaces and monuments. Successive generations added to this landscape rather than replacing it all at once, so civic, royal and sacred buildings stood close together on the acropolis while housing and markets spread down the hill.

On this page6 sections

Building a capital on a steep acropolis

Pergamon’s terrain shaped both its construction and its movement. The acropolis rose above the surrounding settlement, with steep sides and limited level ground. Builders cut terraces into the slopes and supported them with retaining walls to make room for buildings and open spaces. Streets wound uphill in sharp turns; where a full road would not fit, narrower lanes connected different levels. As the city expanded, new buildings sometimes occupied ground already used by earlier structures.

Philetaerus fortified and developed the upper city. Later rulers extended the settlement beyond the summit. Under Eumenes II and Attalus II, Pergamon gained a larger circuit of walls, new streets and substantial public projects, including a marketplace and a gymnasium on the eastern side of the hill. The growth brought more residents and activity onto the slopes, while the acropolis remained the city’s most prominent setting for royal display and civic life.

Hellenistic houses adapted to the same constraints. Many were arranged around a small, roughly square courtyard, with rooms on one or two sides and principal rooms often placed along the north. Designs and room sizes varied with the slope and the existing street plan. Cisterns in some courtyards collected rainwater from the roofs, making household water storage part of the city’s domestic infrastructure.

Markets, civic space and public buildings

Civic activity was concentrated on the acropolis from the early Attalid period. The Upper Agora, an open public space at the southern end of the upper city, developed over time into a place for both commerce and public display. A temple of Zeus stood there under Attalus I. Later building works added halls whose rear rooms are thought to have accommodated trade. The market’s character changed as the sanctuary of Athena and the great altar nearby were enlarged: commercial activity continued, but the surrounding architecture made the space more visibly monumental.

Eumenes II also built the Lower Agora, a market arranged across different levels to suit the slope. Its central area included a large columned hall with small shop spaces and other rooms. The arrangement brought traders and customers into a sheltered public setting without requiring the ground to be levelled into a single broad plaza. Together, the two agoras show how the city combined everyday exchange with the formal spaces of its capital.

A large gymnasium complex occupied three terraces on the southern side of the acropolis. The upper terrace included a courtyard surrounded by colonnades and other buildings; this area is identified as a palaestra, or exercise court. A roofed stadium lay between the middle and upper terraces. The use of some rooms remains uncertain, but the terraces show how the rulers fitted a large public institution into difficult terrain; later rulers added to the complex.

The Hellenistic theatre used the steep slope for its seating and stood above a long terrace supported by a retaining wall. Its stage building was made of wood and could be taken down when no performance was taking place, leaving the view along the terrace toward the temple of Dionysus at its northern end open. A later marble stage building belongs to a subsequent phase. This theatre was therefore both a venue for performance and part of a carefully arranged sequence of spaces on the acropolis.

Royal patronage and sacred architecture

The Attalids built around older sacred places as well as founding new projects. The sanctuary of Athena included a temple dating to the fourth century BCE, before the dynasty’s rise. Under Eumenes II, two-storey colonnades and a monumental entrance reshaped the sanctuary, while victory dedications by Attalus I and Eumenes II added further royal statements within it. The sanctuary’s elevated position and its proximity to royal and civic buildings made it a prominent part of the acropolis landscape.

The sanctuary of Demeter occupied the southern slope. A dedication on its temple and altar names Philetaerus and his brother Eumenes as donors on behalf of their mother Boa. The buildings therefore joined worship of the goddess with the public commemoration of a family relationship. Colonnades around the court gave visitors shelter and defined the approach to the temple and altar.

The Great Altar, probably built under Eumenes II in the second century BCE, occupied a terrace below Athena’s sanctuary. A broad staircase led from ground level to a colonnaded upper court containing the sacrificial altar. The monument combined an elevated place of worship with sculpted narratives encountered on the approach and within the court. Its precise divine dedication remains debated.

The altar’s broad base measured about 36 by 33 metres, and a staircase almost 20 metres wide led to its upper level. Its exterior carried a high-relief frieze, about 113 metres long, showing the Gigantomachy, the mythical battle between the Olympian gods and the Giants. The scene presents a cosmic conflict, not a direct record of a particular Attalid military campaign. A smaller inner frieze represented episodes from the life of Telephus, a legendary founder of Pergamon and son of Heracles. The Attalids traced their ancestry to Heracles, so the story connected the city’s origins with the dynasty’s claims to heroic descent.

Sculpture, materials and artistic production

Pergamon’s monumental building programme required the coordinated work of builders and sculptors. Terraces and retaining structures prepared the ground; masons worked local stone and marble; sculptors carved architectural decoration and freestanding figures. The altar’s construction illustrates the scale of that effort. Its foundations used intersecting walls of tuff, while marble from the island of Marmara and darker stone from Lesbos-Moria were used in its decoration. Moving and assembling such materials on a steep acropolis added to the practical demands of the work.

The altar’s reliefs required several sculptors to work within a common design. Figures project strongly from the background, with overlapping bodies, deeply cut folds and forceful gestures creating an impression of struggle. The sculptor Theorretos is named in a surviving signature. Named practitioners associated with Pergamon also include Epigonus, a sculptor, and Sosus, known for mosaic work.

Royal patronage made sculpture part of the city’s public environment. Temples and sanctuaries accumulated dedications, while the altar’s reliefs placed mythic narratives on a scale visible across the surrounding terraces. These works did more than decorate buildings: they connected royal giving to the shared civic landscape and presented Pergamon as a centre of Greek artistic culture.

The foundations of the altar remain at Pergamon, but many of its relief panels are displayed in Berlin in a modern partial reconstruction. That museum presentation is not the intact ancient building. Keeping the site foundations and the relocated sculpture distinct helps explain what survives and how the monument is encountered today.

The royal library and scholarship

The Attalids supported scholarship through a royal collection of scrolls. Its rooms are often identified beside the northern colonnade of Athena’s sanctuary, although that identification remains disputed. Inscriptions mentioning a library in the gymnasium may concern another collection. Books could therefore be associated with more than one institution in the city.

The library belonged to competition among Hellenistic courts to attract books and scholars. Crates of Mallus was associated with Pergamene work on Homer: comparing readings, interpreting language and explaining the meaning of the poems were scholarly activities in their own right. A collection made copies available for this work and gave a ruler a means of supporting learned reputations. The much later report of 200,000 scrolls is a literary claim, rather than a surviving catalogue.

Pergamon was associated with parchment, a writing material prepared from animal skin. The skin was cleaned, stretched and scraped to form a surface on which writing could be laid out. Prepared skins had been used long before the Attalids. The later story that an Egyptian papyrus embargo forced Pergamon to invent parchment compresses a much older craft into a tale of royal rivalry.

From Attalid rule to Roman settlement

Attalus III’s death and bequest in 133 BCE brought the dynasty’s building patronage to an end. After the revolt against Roman control, the provincial settlement of 129 BCE placed much of the former kingdom in the province of Asia. Pergamon’s institutions and sacred places continued to develop, with Roman additions eventually altering the capital the Attalids had built.

For the wider setting, see Pergamon: History, Government and Society under the Attalids.