Author: By Michael J. Berlin, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, February 7, 1999

Page: M5

Section: Travel

ATHENS -- As we walked through the agora on the last full day of our first trip to Greece, the pieces all came together for us. The agora was where the essential elements of life were lived in classical times. It was the commercial hub of Athens but more than just a marketplace. It was also a center of religious ceremony. Most important, the peculiarly pure and rigorous system of government called democracy took shape for the first time here, and was played out.

The places where these democratic institutions functioned are still there -- visible, mapped out. They form an oasis of calm in the heart of today's fast-paced, noisy, and crowded Athens. Once we got our physical and metaphysical bearings, we were exhilarated by our ability to envision the marketplace, teeming with activity, where philosophers disputed and, later on, St. Paul preached to the Athenians. In our mind's eye, we could conjure up the administrative workings of Athenian democracy: the buildings where the council of 500 ate, slept, and drafted laws; the court where Socrates was condemned to death for poisoning the minds of Athenian youth and ``making the worse seem the better cause''; the wall dedicated to the mythical heroes who represented the tribes into which Athenian citizens were divided, on which were posted the names of citizens drafted by lottery to serve the public, edicts of the courts, and the wording of potential laws; the mint that produced coins used throughout the civilized world; the military headquarters where the defense (and imperial conquests) of Athens was planned.

Anyone with a basic awareness of the significance of this place and its political legacy for the contemporary world may well find the Athens agora to be the most powerful site in all of Greece, because of its ability to make that heritage come alive. Other ancient cities (such as Ephesus in Turkey) have more rubble elegantly standing, and other sites (such as the Athens Acropolis, on its hill just above the agora) are more sweeping. But this is where it really happened.

Our own awareness was derived from misty college memories of Herodotus and Thucydides, and our more recent readings of guidebooks and a paperback primer on classical Greece, most of it on the long flight to Athens. But it took being there to people the place with tyrants, demigods, and the real heroes of Western civilization.

Our visit to the agora also showed us the tangible artifacts of Greek democracy -- ones that brought to life these ancient Athenians and their way of regulating society. These metal, marble, and pottery remains were found in the rubble by American archeologists over the last 70 years of excavation, after 350 nineteenth-century houses were swept away and 300,000 tons of accumulated dirt was sifted to reach what was ground level in the fifth century BC.

The most telling of these treasures, such as the marble slab called a ``kleroterion,'' are now on display in the agora's museum, housed in the rebuilt Stoa of Attalos. As we looked at this unprepossessing stone, we could understand the physical workings of this (theoretically) pure form of democracy. After the overthrow of the Athenian tyranny (at the end of the sixth century BC), Cleisthenes reorganized the citizenry into 10 tribes (``trittyes''), each of which chose by lot 50 members to serve for a year in the legislative council (``boule''). The stone in front of us was used to select one of these 50 to represent the tribe in the collective presidency, which made the day-to-day administrative decisions of the city-state. The stone has a row of 50 slits for each tribe, and into each would be inserted a piece of paper with the name of one of the tribal representatives. Then, much like a contemporary lottery drawing, 50 balls (49 white and one black) would be released at random to match the 50 slots, and the name on the paper matched to the black ball would serve on the presidency for a short time.

For us, it was a moment of awesome awareness. Here it was, the system of government that -- 2 1/2 millennium later, although in a much less pure form -- serves as the political role model for our world in the late 20th century. This was how it first worked. These few acres were where it functioned.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To reach that point, we started out from our hotel on a clear and cool May morning. Our cab had just fought through the usual Athens traffic jam, depositing us on the Avenue of the Apostle Paul. We crossed it at a run to survive the phalanx of motor scooters, and entered the agora. Our guidebooks (Michelin and the Blue Guide, to name two) underrated it with one grudging star and called it a jumble of marble or ``a huge bombsite.''

There are three entrances to the agora, but we found the best place to start is just downhill from the Acropolis, off the Leoforos Apostolou Pavlou. When we paid our 1,200 drachmas (four bucks; discounts for elders, students, teachers, and others), we found ourselves approaching the Hephaistion, which was readily identifiable because (unlike most Greek temples) it is almost all still there, and gave us the best sense we had throughout Greece of what a classical temple really looked like.

The temple, apparently built by the same architect who designed the Parthenon, was among the first public buildings undertaken by Pericles after the Persian sack of Athens in 480 BC. It was formerly thought to honor Theseus, the mythic founder of Athens, but in fact stood amid the ancient city's blacksmith shops, and was dedicated to Hephaistos, god of the forge. One reason that it survived almost intact is that it served as a church until well into the 19th century.

From its small hill (replanted with almond, myrtle, pomegranate, and other plants that were there in antiquity), we looked down, eastward, over the ruins of the agora, with the Hephaistion just to our left. At first it did seem to be just a jumble of marble ruins and gravel paths, below today's street level. The open cut of the Athens subway line was off to our left, the Acropolis loomed above us to the right, and stretching almost all the way across the far end of this open space was an obviously recent replica of an ancient Greek colonnade -- the Stoa of Attalos. There was a bench where we stood, and a large map-board that let us pick out and put names and functions to all the sites sprawling below us.

Following the path down to the right of the temple, we came to the heart of Athenian government, the foundations of the rounded ``tholos'' where the members of the collective presidency ate and slept while on duty -- the closest equivalent to our White House. Beside it was the Bouleterion, where the legislative council (``boule'') drafted laws, and beyond that was the Metroon, which was both a temple dedicated to the mother of the Olympian gods and the repository for Athenian state archives. Part of the flooring here is a mosaic, laid down in Roman times.

Here and at other spots around the agora the day of our visit, we encountered groups of Greek schoolchildren touring their heritage (and ours). At each spot, they took turns reading aloud research reports about the significance of the site. We wished we could understand the details.

Unlike other places we had visited in Greece, the agora was spotless. There were plenty of trash barrels, and they were being put to use.

Just across the gravel path from the Metroon was the quite nondescript base of a wall. The map identified it rather awkwardly as the ``monument of the eponymous heroes,'' which means that the statues of the 10 heroes for whom Cleisthenes named his 10 ``trittyes'' were displayed there.

Taking our cue from a group of Greek middle-schoolers who had stopped there to recite, we spotted a small placard on the wall. It explained in English that this is where Athenians came to read, on wooden boards painted white, the official notices of laws that were being proposed to the assembly, court verdicts, and the names of citizens drafted to serve the state in one capacity or another. It was, in a sense, a true ``democracy wall.''

The one major element of Athenian democracy that was not centered in the agora was the assembly of all citizens, where laws drafted by the boule were approved, and once a year the majority could conduct a most peculiar rite -- casting secret ballots on shards of pottery (``ostraka'') to determine whether a leader who threatened to become a tyrant should be exiled -- ostracized -- for 10 years. The assembly met on a nearby hill, the Pnyx, which today is filled with seats for an assembly of a very different sort: the nightly sound-and-light spectacle on the Acropolis.

For the Athenians, government was, at least in formal terms, a religious rite as well as a system of social organization. The agora was a sacred precinct, from which certain convicted felons were barred, and citizens had to perform a rite of purification upon entering. Governmental decisions were accompanied by sacrifices. Right beside the government buildings (to the north, away from the Acropolis) was a temple of Apollo, who among other things was the patron god of government. It was there that magistrates took their oaths and eligible young boys were registered as Athenian citizens.

Beyond that, farther north, was the Stoa of Zeus, where Socrates argued philosophy with his friends and disciples. The Athens subway line, running east and west, cuts off the agora at this point, but on the day we were there, workmen were slowly excavating a recently expropriated site beyond the open rail cut, on both sides of Adrianou Street. This site, fully visible from above but still not open to the public, apparently contains the remains of the ``painted stoa,'' another building dating from the Periclean Age, which was originally decorated with scenes of Athenian battles, from Troy to the victories over the Persians and Spartans; part museum, part shrine, and part monument.

At the end of the third century BC, the philosopher Zeno put forth his theories in this stoa, which is why they became known as ``stoic.'' East of this line of public buildings, the agora was during the golden age of Athens a jumble of markets. Most of the stalls were pigeonholed in the covered arcades, or stoas, which allowed buyers and sellers alike to escape the heat of summer or the rain of winter.

The most striking ruin in this part of the agora today is a section of the vast theater built in 15 BC by Agrippa, the son-in-law of the Roman emperor Augustus. Our first reaction was to see it as a desecration -- the equivalent of the Golden Arches intruded into the Tuileries gardens. On the other hand, it was a 2,000-year-old monument in itself, and probably a lot classier than the markets that stood in the agora before it.

In antiquity, the market area also featured monuments erected along the graveled Panathenaic Way, the sacred processional route that ran from the stadium where contests were held, through the agora and up a ramp to the Acropolis.

The 20th-century excavation has restored the Panathenaic Way, which is graveled once again, though all that remains of the monuments are some of their marble bases. On the north end (to our left coming from the Hephaistion) is an entry gate that leads over the subway line to Adrianou street. (For those in need of a coffee break or lunch break, Adrianou here features outdoor cafes and tavernas, serving Greek businesspeople as well as tourists.)

On the south end of the Panathenaic Way, we found an exquisite anachronism, the 11th-century Church of the Holy Apostles, which has been restored to its original form, and has some transplanted 17th-century wall paintings inside. Right beside it was the site of the Athenian mint, which churned out silver coins bearing a likeness of Athena on one side and her symbols -- an owl and an olive branch -- on the other, and became the universal currency from Gibraltar to the Black Sea for two centuries.

There is another entry gate at this spot, through which the Panathenaic Way winds upward to the Acropolis. Just outside the gate is a lush green park, which in spring was dotted with poppies and redolent with pine trees; the park adjoins the picturesque hillside neighborhood of Anafiotika.

We wandered there among the ubiquitous cats of Athens, picnicked in the shade (as many Athenians were also doing on a Sunday afternoon) and, refreshed, flashed our tickets to return to the agora.

There was one last site to visit, the Stoa of Attalos, built in the middle of the second century BC by the king of Pergamon and rebuilt (with Rockefeller money) by the American School of Classical Studies in the 1950s. The vast covered arcade is 382 feet long, with 45 Doric columns on the ground floor and Ionic columns on the floor above. But instead of the pricey shops of the classical era, the outdoor arcade is filled with statues found in the excavations, and the ground floor of the interior with artifacts such as our marble kleroterion, or lottery board.

As we approached it -- as grateful for the shade as the ancients must have been -- we feared it would be an anticlimax, but it was far from that. The exhibits synthesized the entire experience for us.

Among the sculptures was an Apollo believed to be the cult figure from the temple whose remains we had visited. There was a stele on which was inscribed the law against tyrants. And there was a relief of a warrior leaping nimbly off a moving chariot, which captured the human figure in motion as expertly as the photographs of Muybridge, 2,400 years later.

Inside, beyond the usual vases and burial treasures, were objects (like the kleroterion) we had seen nowhere else in Greece. There were pots that held hemlock for executions (perhaps the one Socrates drank from in 399 BC?). There was a fragment from the monument honoring the tyrannicides of 514 BC: ``A great light shone for the Athenians when Harmodios and Aristogeiton slew Hipparchos . . . they made their fatherland free.'' There were the metal standard weights and measures that were kept in the round tholos, the first building we came to in the agora. There were coins and market goods, including a child's potty made of terra-cotta (and a contemporary photo showing it in use). From the law courts, there were bronze jury discs (a disc with a solid center meant innocent; one with a hollow center indicated guilty) and a water clock used to limit the lawyers' pleas (a device that could find use in American jurisprudence).

What impressed us most was the collection of ostraka, used by citizens to vote for the exile of leaders who had gone too far. It took 6,000 votes to exile a citizen for 10 years. There were pottery shards inscribed with most of the great names of Athens' golden age -- Aristides the Just, Themistocles,Pericles, Kimon.

Some went beyond naming the target. One couplet inscribed on an ostrakon reads: ``Xanthippos son of Arriphron is cursed for his rascality; too long he has, the potsherd says, abused our hospitality.''

One cabinet holds a collection of more than 100 ostraka from 482 BC, with the name of Themistocles -- in the same handwriting. These votes were never cast; they were found in a well on the hillside above the agora, not on the Pnyx, where the assembly voted. But they showed that some people tried to fix elections even in the purest of democracies.

These display cases provided us with one revelation after another about the practical workings of Athenian democracy and life, all the more powerful because we had just been at the places where the artifacts were used.

We left the museum by the gate leading out onto Adrianou Street, and plunged into the Monastiraki district, whose narrow streets held arcades of shops and hawkers selling food, jewelry, clothing, and souvenirs.

It was a reminder that one aspect of the agora of the golden age had not changed at all.

There are three entrances, the most accessible of which by cab or bus is on Leoforos Apostolou Pavlou in the Thission district. The others are on Adrianou Street in Monastiraki and Polygnotou street in Anafiotika, which is a short walk from the Acropolis or the Plaka area.

Admission to the site and museum (the Stoa of Attalos; a separate stub is attached to the ticket and is collected at the museum door) is about $4.50 US, but there are many cateories of discount. Ask for the free booklet, ``The Ancient Agora of Athens,'' which has a useful site map and summary. A good general guidebook will help make the site come alive.

Books on the excavations are available at the entrances.

Hours are 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily in summer; otherwise, 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Tuesdays through Sundays.

Fresh water and clean restrooms are at the north end of the museum. Cafes and tavernas abound on Adrianou and within several blocks of the other two entrances. If you take a cafe break, your ticket stub allows reentry to both site and museum the same day.