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A vast Roman building complex on the eastern edge of the Monastiraki square in central Athens, the Library of Hadrian was completed in 132 AD by the philhellene Roman emperor Hadrian as the principal cultural and educational facility of the Roman provincial capital. The building covered around twenty-three thousand square metres and was the largest single Roman building constructed anywhere in Greece during the imperial period. The emperor Hadrian had a particularly deep personal attachment to Athens and the wider Greek cultural tradition. He visited the city three times during his reign and made a series of substantial benefactions to the cultural infrastructure of the city, including the library, the completion of the great Temple of Olympian Zeus that had been left unfinished by the tyrants of the sixth century BC, the construction of the famous Arch of Hadrian and the establishment of the Panhellenion, a federation of all Greek-speaking cities under the loose patronage of the Roman emperor. The library itself was conceived as more than a conventional book repository. The central rectangular court was surrounded by a continuous colonnaded portico on all four sides, providing shaded walkways for philosophical discussion and informal learning. The main library room on the eastern side housed the actual book collection, with smaller rooms on the side providing space for individual reading, lectures and small seminars. The original collection of scrolls and codices is variously estimated at between sixteen and twenty thousand individual works, drawn from the various provincial libraries of the eastern empire and from the personal collections of various imperial patrons. The library functioned as both an active research institution and as a public symbol of the imperial patronage of Greek culture, with successive emperors continuing to support the institution through to the late antique period. The building was severely damaged by the Herulian invasion of 267 AD and was substantially abandoned in its original form during the third and fourth centuries AD. The interior of the rectangular court was progressively used for various small buildings during the Byzantine period, including a series of small churches and the Megali Panagia basilica of the fifth century. The site was excavated by the Greek Archaeological Service between 1885 and 1989, with the various medieval additions removed to reveal the original Roman library underneath.