In the first years of settlement, the twenty-five founding families had worked together to construct the buildings of the Commons: the self-reliance school, athenaeum, communion lodge, town hall and Littleton's first exchange, where goods and services could be bought or bartered. The Year's Be...
1727, "temple dedicated to Athena," from Latinized form of Greek Athenaion "the temple of Athene," in ancient Athens, in which professors taught and actors or poets rehearsed; see Athena. The modern meaning "literary club-room or reading room" is from 1799; the sense of "literary or scie...