Classical Athens

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Classical Athens stood about 30 stadia from the sea, on the southwest slope of Mount Lycabettus, ringed by three small rivers and a wall roughly 1.5 km across. Inside that wall, by the close of the Peloponnesian War, more than 10,000 houses crowded together. Reckoned at twelve people to a house, that gives a city of 120,000, and some writers pushed the figure as high as 180,000.

  The houses themselves were mostly insignificant. The streets were badly laid out. Yet this was the place later called the cradle of Western civilization and the birthplace of democracy. How did a cramped town of modest homes become the home of Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum? Why did its people defeat the largest empire of their age, then turn their power against fellow Greeks? And how did a democracy that lasted 180 years finally lose its independence? The answers run through silver mines, a steep rock crowned with temples, and a single statesman who gave his city a splendor it would never see again.

• 2. A Democracy Born Of Exile

  ›

  Hippias, son of Peisistratus, turned cruel after his brother Hipparchus was assassinated around 514. He exiled 700 Athenian noble families, among them the Alcmaeonids, the family of Cleisthenes. The exiles fled to Delphi. Herodotus says they bribed the Pythia to keep telling visiting Spartans to invade Attica and overthrow Hippias.

  Cleomenes I eventually led a Spartan force that toppled Hippias and installed an oligarchy. Cleisthenes, like many Athenians, resented Spartan rule and made his own bid for power. The result was democracy in Athens. His motive complicates the story, because without the people's support he would have been defeated, so his great gift to the world also served the man who created it.

  The reforms of Cleisthenes swept away the four old Ionic tribes and replaced them with ten new ones, named after legendary heroes and built on no class basis. Each tribe split into three trittyes drawn from coast, city, and inland, and each trittys held one or more demes, the foundation of local government.

  The ten tribes each chose fifty members by lot for the Boule, the council that ran Athens day to day. The Assembly, or Ecclesia, was open to all full citizens and served as both legislature and supreme court. Only murder cases and religious matters stayed with the older council, the Areopagus. Most offices were filled by lot, but the ten strategoi, the generals, were elected. Among the forces shaping public opinion were the comic poets, whose political satires were performed in the city theaters.

• 3. Silver And The Persian Wars

  ›

  The silver mines of Laurion, in southeastern Attica, transformed Athens in the 5th century BC. Once the Athenians learned to prospect, treat, and refine the ore, they poured the proceeds into a massive fleet, urged on by Themistocles. That decision would soon decide the survival of Greece.

  In 499 BC, Athens sent troops to help the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor rebelling against Persia. The move provoked two Persian invasions. In 490, Miltiades led the Athenians to halt the first invasion, sent by Darius I, at the Battle of Marathon. In 480 the Persians returned under Xerxes I.

  The Hellenic League under the Spartan king Leonidas sent 7,000 men to hold the narrow pass of Thermopylae against an army of 100,000 to 250,000. Leonidas and 300 Spartan elites died there. At the same time the Athenians fought an indecisive naval action off Artemisium. The delay was not enough. The Persians marched through Boeotia, made Thebes their base, and pushed into southern Greece, forcing the Athenians to abandon their city.

  Xerxes had a throne built on the coast to watch the Greeks defeated. Instead his navy was routed at the Battle of Salamis, where Themistocles led the Athenians and their allies to victory. Hegemony was passing from Sparta to Athens, and it was Athens that carried the war into Asia Minor. The victories of Cimon in the 470s and 460s drew most of the Aegean into the Delian League, an alliance dominated by Athens.

• 4. The Age Of Pericles

  ›

  Pericles rose first as deputy to Ephialtes, leader of the democratic faction. When Ephialtes was assassinated by personal enemies, Pericles stepped forward. He was elected strategos in 445 BC and held the post by repeated election of the Assembly until his death in 429 BC.

  Pericles fostered arts and literature and gave Athens a splendor it would never recover. He launched a large number of public works projects and improved the lives of ordinary citizens, which is why this period is called the Age of Pericles. The silver of Laurium fed the prosperity of this Golden Age.

  Under his administration rose the Parthenon, a lavishly decorated temple to the goddess Athena. Pericles used the tribute paid by members of the Delian League to fund the Parthenon and other great monuments. In his own words, the city had become an education for Hellas, a phrase usually quoted as the school of Greece. He shared that city with figures whose names still anchor Western thought: the dramatists Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles, the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, the poet Simonides, and the sculptor Phidias.

• 5. War, Defeat, And Recovery

  ›

  Resentment of Athenian dominance ignited the Peloponnesian War in 431. It set Athens and her restless sea empire against a coalition of land-based states led by Sparta. The war ended Athenian command of the sea, and Athens finally fell in 404 after Sparta built a navy of its own.

  A coup in 411, blamed on poor handling of the war, briefly overthrew the democracy, but it was quickly restored. The final defeat in 404 was pinned largely on democratic politicians such as Cleon and Cleophon, and a reaction set in, backed by the Spartan army. That was the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. In 403, Thrasybulus restored democracy and declared an amnesty.

  Sparta's own allies turned against her imperial policies, and Athens's old enemies Thebes and Corinth became her friends. Argos, Thebes, and Corinth joined Athens against Sparta in the Corinthian War of 395-387 BC. In 378, when the Spartan commander Sphodrias tried to seize Piraeus by surprise, Athens answered by founding the Second Athenian League.

  Thebes broke Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra in 371. Then other cities, Athens among them, turned on Thebes, and its dominance ended at the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC with the death of its brilliant commander, Epaminondas. The balance of Greek power was now wide open, and a new force was rising in the north.

• 6. The End Of Independence

  ›

  Philip II of Macedon grew dominant in Greek affairs by the middle of the 4th century, despite the fierce opposition of Demosthenes. In 338 BC his army crushed Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea, sharply limiting Athenian independence. That winter, Macedonia, Athens, and other Greek states were folded into the League of Corinth.

  The conquests of Philip's son, Alexander the Great, widened Greek horizons and made the traditional city-state obsolete. After Alexander, Athens fought on as a maritime power until the Lamian War closed in 322 BC, one year after his death.

  Antipater dissolved the Athenian government in 322 BC and set up a plutocratic system. Athens stayed a wealthy city with a brilliant cultural life, but it was no longer an independent power. Its democracy, established by Cleisthenes in 508 BC, had endured with only brief interruptions for 180 years.

• 7. The Rock And Its Walls

  ›

  The Acropolis was a steep rock about 50 meters high, 350 meters long, and 150 meters wide, scarped naturally on every side but the west. It was also called Cecropia after its reputed founder, Cecrops, and was once ringed by an ancient Cyclopean wall said to have been raised by the Pelasgians. By the Peloponnesian War only the north stretch survived as the Pelasgic Wall, while the rebuilt south part was the Cimonian Wall.

  On the west end, the only practicable approach, stood the magnificent Propylaea, the Entrances built by Pericles, with the small Temple of Athena Nike before its right wing. The grandest temple on the summit was the Parthenon, sacred to the Virgin goddess Athena. North of it rose the Erechtheion, holding three sanctuaries: one to Athena Polias, the Protectress of the State, the sanctuary of Erechtheus, and the Pandroseion. Between them stood the colossal Statue of Athena Promachos, whose helmet and spear were the first object on the Acropolis visible from the sea.

  Themistocles ringed both the city and the port of Piraeus with walls after Xerxes burned Athens in 480 BC. The Long Walls, built under Conon and Pericles, ran 40 stadia to Piraeus, and a third wall stretched 35 stadia to Phalerum. The full circuit measured 174.5 stadia, nearly 22 miles, split among the city, the long walls, and the harbor district. The finest suburb lay beyond the Outer Kerameikos to the northwest, where Athenians who fell in war were buried, and six stadia from the city stood the Academy.