Four Buildings Under the Same Roofless Name

The Telesterion the ancient prohibition protected was not one hall but a sequence of them, rebuilt on the same ground across more than a thousand years, and Mylonas's excavation is what recovered the sequence physically rather than only from literary mention. The earliest substantial hall belongs to the sixth century BC, expanded under Peisistratos and his sons as Eleusis grew into a sanctuary drawing more than local worship. Persian forces destroyed that building in 480 BC, and Kimon began a replacement on the same foundations that his own building program never finished. The Periklean age tried again, twice, the architect Iktinos, better known for the Parthenon, drawing a design that was begun and abandoned, and a second team, Koroibos, Metagenes and Xenokles, completing the hall that stood through the classical and Hellenistic centuries. Rome added a final chapter forced on it rather than chosen, raiders identified as the Costoboci burning the sanctuary in 170 AD, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius funding its rebuilding along with a monumental gate copied directly from the Propylaea of the Athenian acropolis. Each version kept the discipline of silence intact across the change of architects, dynasties and even conquerors, which is a fact about the institution's durability that the missing content, however total, cannot itself convey.