The gate was integrated into the Post-Herulian Wall, a late Roman fortification built around the Acropolis in the years following the city's sack by the Germanic Heruli people in 267 or early 268 CE.

Its discovery was greeted enthusiastically in France among the scholarly community and the press, though archaeologists and Greek commentators criticised the aggressive means – particularly the use of explosives – by which Beulé had carried out the excavation.

Under Demetrios of Phaleron, who governed Athens between 317 and 307 BCE, sumptuary laws to control aristocrats' ostentatious spending caused the construction of choragic monuments to cease.

In the 1880s, Wilhelm Dörpfeld suggested 161 CE, on the grounds of his belief that a foundation discovered underneath the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, constructed in that year, had originally belonged to the monument.

[19] In 1910, William Bell Dinsmoor disproved Dörpfeld's hypothesis by demonstrating that the Nikias monument had originally stood at the eastern end of the Stoa of Eumenes.

[20] Dinsmoor alternatively suggested that the demolition may have dated to the late third or early fourth centuries CE,[21] a view since established as the scholarly consensus.

[27] Judith Binder has suggested that the gate may have been constructed by Dexippos,[5] the Athenian general who successfully defended the Acropolis against the Heruli during their invasion.

[30][a] It also identifies him as a former agonothetes (ἀγωνοθέτης), a title given in Roman Athens to the officials responsible for funding and organising religious festivals, including the Panathenaia, the Dionysia, and games in honour of the imperial family.

[33] The archaeologist and philologist Walter Miller suggested in 1893 that the gate may have been built to replace an older, now-lost gateway, which he hypothesised would have been less strongly fortified.

[34] The Beulé Gate is believed to have been intended to safeguard the approach leading to the Klepsydra, a spring on the Acropolis which provided it with a safe supply of water in case of siege.

[46] The medieval notary Niccolò da Martoni, who visited Athens in February 1395, wrote an account suggesting that the Beulé Gate was still visible, though no longer used.

[54] Beulé had joined the French School in 1849,[55] and discovered the gate while excavating the approach to the Propylaia under the direction of Kyriakos Pittakis, the Greek Ephor General of Antiquities.

[57] The existence of a lower route to the Propylaia had become evident during the operations to clear and repair the monuments of the Acropolis following the end of the Greek War of Independence in 1829.

[52] Beulé, against the prevailing scholarly opinion of his time, believed that Mnesikles, the architect of the Propylaia, had originally constructed a second gateway, and secured Pittakis's blessing as well as support from Alexandre de Forth-Rouen, the French ambassador to Greece, to investigate his hypothesis.

[62] Beulé left Athens for France at the beginning of June, returning in December to direct renewed excavations, now focused on the gate.

Beulé secured a batch of explosives from sailors of the Station du Levant,[63] a fleet of the French Navy tasked with patrolling the Aegean Sea,[64] and used 150 lb (68 kg) of gunpowder to blast through the block.

The diplomat and philhellene Jean Baelan [sv] has written that the excavation turned Beulé into "the standard-bearer for national honour in the field of archaeology".

[72] In recognition of Beulé's discovery, the Académie Française made the Acropolis of Athens the topic for its Grand Prize for Poetry[e] in 1853, which was won by Louise Colet.

[74] Ludwig Ross, who had preceded Pittakis as Ephor General, described the inscription as "an example of petty national and personal vanity" and predicted that it was likely to be stolen or removed by the Greeks.