This talk defines collecting as a practice that requires the collector’s time, thought, and infrastructure. I will engage with the biographical frames and spaces of private antiquities collecting in Athens during the second half of the nineteenth century with the example of Athanasios Rousopoulos. Rousopoulos was archaeology professor, collector and art dealer and lived in Athens for many years (1855-1898); this city — the political and intellectual center of the Greek state since 1834 — was the place where he set up his scholarly career and distinguished himself as expert collector. How did Rousopoulos’ scholarship inform his antiquities collecting? What collecting purpose(s) does his use of ‘cabinets’ bring to the fore? And finally: where did the administrative spheres of private and public antiquities collecting in Greece show similarities, what were the differences?