This monumental altar was originally constructed in the fourth century B.C.E. and was one of the first objects discovered at the Agora during the initial season of excavations in 1931.   The altar is situated east of the Metroon.  At first the altar was thought to occupy its original fourth-century site.  Upon closer examination, evidence indicated that it had been dismantled and rebuilt, because of the masons' marks on the ends of the blocks.   These marks exhibit the same classicizing style as those on blocks from the Temple of Ares, and so form the best available dating evidence for the altar's move.  The transfer then should be dated to the movement of many other structures in the Agora in the Augustan period.  The excavators observed the altar fit a rock-cut bedding at the Pnyx,  and indeed such an altar is known to have existed on the Pnyx earlier in antiquity.

 It seems likely that the transfer of the altar took place in an Augustan setting, with the diminishing role of the Pnyx in Athenian civic affairs.  The Theater of Dionysus had already supplanted the Pnyx as the place of assembly and the assembly’s political authority further declined under the reign of Augustus.   The new seating of the altar in the Agora may have also symbolized the transferal of the less democratic Augustan assembly to the site where occasional assemblies had met before the "radical democracies" of the fifth century had focused on the Pnyx.   This new location of the altar would explain a later scholiast's note in Aristophanes' Knights that "Zeus Agoraios is set up in the Agora and in the Assembly Place."   As one scholar noted, "it may not be coincidence that Zeus, whose special task it was to govern the political assemblies of the Athenians, should depart the Pnyx at just the time when Augustus is said to have curtailed sharply the powers of those same assemblies."
 

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