Oh, Athens… the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence. The Cradle of Western Civilization.note The Cradle of Hellenic Civilization. The birthplace of Democracy. The School of Hellas. The Renaissance city before The Renaissance itself. The violet-crowned city. The Glorious City. You name it…
Athens (Greek: Αθήνα, Athína) is the capital of Greece and its largest city, with a population of 4 million residents. It dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years. The basin is bounded by four large mountains: Mount Aigaleo to the west, Mount Parnitha to the north, Mount Pentelicus to the northeast and Mount Hymettus to the east.
It has a large financial sector, and its port Piraeus is both the largest passenger port in Europe and the second largest in the world. The Municipality of Athens (also City of Athens), which actually constitutes a small administrative unit of the entire city, had a population of 664,046 (in 2011) within its official limits, and a land area of 38.96 km2 (15.04 sq mi). The Athens Urban Area (Greater Athens and Greater Piraeus) extends beyond its administrative municipal city limits, with a population of 3,090,508 (in 2011) over an area of 412 sq km (159 sq mi). According to Eurostat in 2011, the functional urban area (FUA) of Athens was the 9th most populous FUA in the European Union (the 6th most populous capital city of the EU), with a population of 3.8 million people. Athens is also the southernmost capital on the European mainland and the warmest major city in Europe.
In ancient times, it was a powerful city-state and a "Center of Arts and Philosophy", a title it hold even in the Roman times. Nowadays, while it may pale compared to much larger and more economically powerful capitals, like London or Paris, for the Greeks it's an important city and a significantly commercial and cultural place.
Popular Landmarks
Athens is a world centre of archaeological research. Except from the Acropolis and the Parthenon, it also features:
- The Athens Concert Hall (Megaro Moussikis), which attracts world class artists.
- The National Archaeological Museum, the largest archaeological museum in the country, and one of the most important internationally, as it contains a vast collection of antiquities; its artifacts cover a period of more than 5,000 years, from late Neolithic Age to Roman Greece.
- The New Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009, and replacing the old museum on the Acropolis. The new museum has proved considerably popular; almost one million people visited during the summer period June–October 2009 alone. A number of smaller and privately owned museums focused on Greek culture and arts are also to be found.
- The Olympic Stadium of Athens with the characteristic rooftop designed by Santiago Calatrava, especially for the 2004 Olympics and has since gained a reputation as one of the most beautiful stadiums in the world, and one of its most interesting modern monuments.
- The Athens Planetarium, which is one of the largest and best equipped digital planetaria in the world.
- The Zappeion, which is currently being used as a Conference and Exhibition Center for both public and private purposes.
- The Benaki Museum with its several branches for each of its collections including ancient, Byzantine, Ottoman-era, and Chinese art and beyond.
- The Numismatic Museum, housing a major collection of ancient and modern coins.
- The Museum of Cycladic Art, home to an extensive collection of Cycladic art, including its famous figurines of white marble.
- The Kerameikos Archaeological Museum, a museum which displays artifacts from the burial site of Kerameikos. Much of the pottery and other artifacts relate to Athenian attitudes towards death and the afterlife, throughout many ages.
- The Jewish Museum of Greece, a museum which describes the history and culture of the Greek Jewish community.
The Parthenon
- "Earth proudly wears the Parthenon as the best gem upon her zone."
You know it, you love it, you cry at its current state.
One of the wonders of the ancient world and a brilliant piece of architecture, designed by Iktinos and Kallikrates. It's regarded as an enduring symbol of Ancient Greece, Athenian democracy and Western civilization and one of the world's greatest cultural monuments. To the Athenians who built it, the Parthenon and other Periclean monuments of the Acropolis were seen fundamentally as a celebration of Hellenic victory over the Persian invaders and as a thanksgiving to the gods for that victory.
It derives from the Greek word παρθενών (parthenon), which referred to the "unmarried women's apartments".
History
Due to being such an old city (and the oldest capital of Europe), it has a long and complicated history. So, we will try to resume it as best as we can.
Although there is evidence of settlements as early as around 7000 BCE, Athens became a big important city around 1400 BCE, smack dab in the Mycenaean period of Greece and part of the wider Bronze Age. Athens most likely became important because of its acropolis, where there is archeological evidence of a citadel being built on the naturally defensible hill (like many other Bronze Age cities such as Mycenae, Pylos and Thebes). There is virtually nothing left of these fortifications apart from a wall of Cyclopean masonry note that can still be seen today.
The Bronze Age collapse (from roughly 1200 BCE to 1100 BCE) that affected other Mycenaean sites like Mycenae (and the wider eastern Mediterranean) appears to have spared Athens to some extent. We don't know much of what happened afterwards because of the Greek Dark Ages, where the Linear B
writing system of Mycenean Greece disappeared and no documents from that period are known note , but judging by the opulence of certain tombs and the presence of trade goods it seems Athens had recovered to a pretty good shape as early as 900 BCE, while the Dark Ages as a whole are considered to end circa 750 BCE (around the time Homer rolls around and writes down tales from the oral tradition such as The Iliad and The Odyssey in a fancy new alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians).
In 622 BCE, by popular demand (effectively making this a form of proto-democracy) the lawmaker Draco was installed, who immediately began to work on a written constitution and written laws to replace the system of oral law and blood feuds. However Draco's laws proved quite harsh, giving us the term "draconian". Still, as harsh as they were, the laws and punishments were at least consistent and ended cycles of revenge.
Athens is famous for installing democracy in 508/507 BC., after its citizens overthrew two tyrants, Hippias and Hipparchus, however other polis had similar democratic institutions, but Athens' democracy (and especially its beginnings) is the most well-documented. It's not entirely clear if it's the first democracy ever. The father of the Athenian democracy is Cleisthenis, who divided citizens in ten groups based on where they lived, rather than on money, which permanently broke the absolute power of the nobility. While not the only democratic lawmaker of Athens, he's arguably the most important. Before its democratic institutions the rulers of Athens were aristocrats known as Archons. Democracy here meant only male citizens could vote, foreigners (known as metics), women and slaves were effectively shit out of luck, and citizenship was only rarely granted, so people could live for generations in Athens without gaining citizenship. It's estimated that at its peak no more than 30% (usually between 10% to 20%) of Athenians were eligible to vote. Still, the system was fairly progressive in certain ways, as there was no monetary or property ownership requirements, meaning a poor citizen had more political power than a wealthy metic note .
In the lead up to the Greco-Persian Wars, Athenian struck the silver motherlode in the mines of the Laurion mountains south of Athens. The general and politician Themistocles convinced the Athenian legislature to use this money to fund a huge navy of around 200 triremes, giving Athens a major Badass Navy that allowed it to project influence into the Aegean sea and beyond. Contrary to the popular image of oar-powered ships being crewed by slaves, ships at the time (at least military ships) were crewed by free men who were well-payed and well-trained (see the Analysis on Slave Galley for why military slave ships are a bad idea). In fact, poor citizens (who couldn't afford to buy and maintain weapons and armor for military service as a hoplite (heavy infantry)) often pushed for war because being a rower meant better pay than working class jobs.
The city played a huge role in the Greco-Persian Wars, which started in 499 BC., when Athens helped its colonies in Asia Minor rebel against The Achaemenid Empire. The rebellion failed, although the Athenians did manage to burn down Sardis.
The Great King, Darius I, furious for this, wanted to punish Athens and Eretria, so he started an Invasion in 492 BC. The Invasion ended in 490 BC., when the Athenians faced the Persian Army at the Battle of Marathon and received a major victory. This victory secured Greece's safety for another ten years. note
During the second invasion (480 BC.) Athens and Sparta led a coalition of city states against the Persians, who were led by the king Xerxes who was getting seriously pissed off with the whole wars and wanted to get over it. The coalition's strategy involved 300 Spartans note led by King Leonidas delaying the Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae while the Athenian navy held back the Persian navy at Artemisium in a stalemate. The eventual defeat at Thermopylae made the naval blockade at Artemisium irrelevant, so the navy retreated at the Saronic Gulf and evacuated Athens civilian population. Athens was burned to the ground, and the remaining Greek armies fortified at Corinth while their navies held the line at Salamis. This was Greece's Last Stand, if either Corinth or Salamis was overrun, the Persians now had access to the Peloponnese and it was game over. Themistocles (the guy who came up with the idea of Athens building a navy) lured the (more numerous) Persian navy in a trap at Salamis where the combined Greek fleets mauled it (adding to the Persian casualties was the fact most of them couldn't swim). The loss of naval superiority made Xerxes fear that the Greeks would destroy the bridges on the Hellespont note and trap him and his forces in Europe, so he quickly hauled ass back home with the bulk of his troops, leaving behind one of his best generals (Mardonius) and his most elite units to try and salvage the war.
The Athenians returned to their burnt city and tried to rebuild, while Mardonius and his forces wintered in Boetia, and returned in 479 BCE to raze Athens once again. This time the coalition chased the remnants of the Persian forces to the north, and in the nearly simultaneous battles of Platae (on land) and Mycale (at sea) the Persians were defeated for good.
From 478 BC. to 431 BC., Athens became one of the two most powerful city-states in Ancient Greece (alongside Sparta) and, with Pericles' contribution, enjoyed a period of cultural growth and influence throughout the Greek world, which came to be known as "The Golden Age of Pericles". It's during this period (starting in 447 BCE) that Athens built the Parthenon on the sites of an older temple destroyed in 480 BCE, as a way of showing thanks to the goddess Athena for saving their bacon (and also to have a place where they could stash the city's treasury). Fearing another war with Persia, Athens decided to create a defensive pact with other cities that they would call the Delian League (named after the island of Delos where the League's money was stored). Athens quickly started using the League to further their own imperial ambitions, to the point that the difference between "Athenian Empire" and "Delian League" became effectively nonexistent. To highlight the point Pericles moved the treasury from Delos to Athens.
The threat from the league to Sparta's power, combined with the weaker polis members of the League who weren't happy with the Athenians using the League's treasury for their own whims, led to The Peloponnesian War, which lasted for 27 years. Long story short, Athens lost to a Sparta-led coalition in 404 BCE and was forced to install an oligarchic system, also known as "The Thirty Tyrants", who were in power for 8 months but managed to kill off 5% of Athens population through their cruelty and oppression before an uprising restored the democratic institutions.
Despite these shortcomings, it still remained a big city and a "Centre of Arts and Philosophy", though it had lost its military and political influence. Just like the rest of the greek city-states, it was eventually conquered by the Macedonians. Under Philip II, and then Alexander the Great, Athens was allowed autonomy and allowed to keep its democratic system so long as it accepted Alexander as the Hegemon of Greece and supported his invasion of Persia (which was a popular cause among Athenians). After Alexander's death, his empire fell into chaos and in this period, Demosthenes formed a league to liberate Greece from Macedonia triggering the Lamian War. Athens lost the war, and the Macedonians replaced the democracy with an oligarchy. And that's how the world's first democracy ended, folks. It lasted for 185 years, which was probably a lot longer than many expected it to run, and certainly that's a longer democratic history than even some modern democracies (barring the USA and UK who have both exceeded its length, at least in terms of constitutional history).
The Athenian democracy was in modern terms, basically a democracy In Name Only. Only a tiny minority of the population had voting rights. Male Athenian free citizens to be specific. Women were not only denied the vote but were also confined to houses and forced to wear veils out in public, which means that Ancient Athens would bear a far closer resemblance to Saudi Arabia and Iran in the 21st Century than any European and North American capital with Neoclassical government buildings (which also exist, to be sure in Saudi Arabia and Iran). Athens also had a large population of slaves, and even aside from that the majority of the population of Athens were residents who had no citizenship rights, who were transient foreigners or migrant and seasonal laborers. Each voter was directly empowered to vote on legislation, military appointments, economic and foreign policy, making it a 'direct democracy' as compared to the representative government of The Roman Republic which is a more influential form of representative elected government than the Athenian model. In Rome, the voters elected representatives who became professional politicians who made decisions on behalf of their voters, claiming mandate for policies based on the number of votes and were subject to elector review at the end of term. In Athens, decision-making was conducted by voters empowered to cast ballots (a process called sortition) and that would lead to appointments on offices. Now in the context of the ancient world, the voting body of Athens was far more diverse in social classes, where a citizen craftsman had the same voting rights as an aristocratic family man, and indeed the votes of a citizen craftsman counted no less than any other. This meant that Athenian government was far more representative of a wider net of economic classes. In Republican Rome by contrast, the offices of the Senate was exclusively and resolutely aristocratic (or Patrician to use the Latin rendering of the Greek-origin 'aristocrat') and the only office for popular assembly was the Tribunate, which was the lower house and essentially disenfranchised from true power for a good chunk of history and debates over the tribune's powers was one of the factors that created the polycrisis that destroyed the Republic.
A lot of the reasons for the downfall of Athens is blamed on their use of the 'direct' model of Democracy, which meant that decision-making was subject to referendum and shifting daily moods of the public, sudden shocks, conspiracy theories, as well as populist appeals to civic nationalism and demagoguery. The fact that the Athenian voters were resolutely politicized meant that there was little room for defining politics as a vocation. People who worked multiple jobs obviously would struggle to devote their full attention to complex bits of legislation, for instance, and many would simply go for the ideas that sound right, and likewise fall into peer pressure, family loyalty, and other local influences (which to be clear exist even in contemporary democracies). Furthermore, the only people who could be full-time politicians were figures like Perikles, who had wealth, aristocratic blood, and free time. He took up the cause of democracy and appealed to the common man. Intellectually, writing and literacy was reserved for only a few, and the development of what we would describe today as a professional class (lawyers, economic advisers, and accountants, teachers) who were necessary for Athens' growing economy was scorned in the writings of the great philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle who were scornful, skeptical, critical, and hostile to Athenian democracy. These figures were described as Sophists, people who would use language to trick and manipulate people, passing them a false knowledge rather than the true knowledge that was open only to the dedicated (who had money, time and patronage denied to the many but such self-reflection didn't exist among Greek philosophers).
The volatility of Athenian Democracy was on full display in its foreign policy, where factions who wished for Athens to export its democracy by creating and settling Poleis across the Ionian Sea clashed with figures who saw these islands as subordinate clients who were weaklings who existed to serve the powerful, i.e. them. One famous incident shows this tendency, the Athenian Populist Kleon campaigned for and passed a legislation to subject the island of Mytilene to a brutal sack led to a punitive expedition to be approved by majority vote. However, the next day, many who voted this experienced second thoughts especially once word spread about the brutal order, and this led to a second law which called for leniency, and then a second expedition to intercept the one from the previous day and provide them with new orders (which was basically, rather than kill all the Mytileneans, they just kill a smaller percentage and call it a day). In a direct democracy, every eligible voter had a voice but the reality of a complex society like Athens meant that majority votes could be done by people who show up to vote, and often taking decisions that the wider electorate wouldn't approve of. The clash of direct democracy with confused foreign policy was one of the reasons which led to the end of Athenian Hegemony in the Peloponnesian War, and after that Athenian democracy could only last so long as it remained economically prosperous and politically useful for powerful states to spare them or humor them, and eventually their luck ran out during the Lamian War.
It still remained a rich city (though, it had lost its autonomy) and it mostly fared well under the Romans arrived. Under Rome, Athens was subject to brutality under Sulla Felix but revived under later commanders and would ultimately gain the stature of a respected and beloved "university town", a place that many Roman aristocrats would send their children to during their teenage days to apprentice and study under scholars at Athens. It would enjoy a long peace of relative safety and stability under the United Romans and then under the Eastern Romans/Byzantines. Economically and demographically however Athens became a much smaller city. There was a major Brain Drain to Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople and other parts of the Roman Imperium. The traders, the artists, the thinkers spread its net wide, and Athens became a city valued for its antiquity and as a tourist attraction rather than a flourishing cultural and commercial center, though it was far from abandoned, and remained a valued port-of-call for traders in the Mediterranean owing to the harbors of Piraeus and Sounion. The city experienced greater instability when the Eastern Roman Empire faced decline during the Crusades. The Fourth Crusade destroyed the Eastern Empire more or less in a form it was never able to recover, and it endured after that as a Vestigial Empire until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Athens fell under the the Ottomans, first in 1397 for a short while, and permanently in 1458. The Sultan Mehmed II was so impressed by the city and its history that he issued an order to not have its monuments damaged on penalty of death, and the Parthenon was turned into a mosque. In the following years Athens declined in importance, becoming little more than a small town, mostly as a result of a continuance of prior trends owing to the rise of other centers of commerce and trade. The Mediterranean itself experienced a general decline with the discovery of new trade routes to Asia, and especially with the discovery of the Americas. And most of the trade was internal and focused on the Eastern Mediterranean Coast in West Asia and North Africa. In this period, the largest Greek city slowly became Smyrna (modern-day Ismir in Turkey) rather than Athens, and other cities like Thessaloniki also became more prominent.
In 1687 a task force sent by the Republic of Venice to attack Athens fired a mortar shell that landed on the Parthenon, which was used by the Ottomans as a gunpowder storage... this is partly why the structure is in relatively poor shape, ''it fucking exploded". With the Ottoman Empire gradually declining in power in the 18th century, more and more Europeans visited the city (and Greece in general). This triggered a wave of philhellenism in Europe and many became interested in the cause of Greek Independence. After Greece earned its independence in 1830 from the Ottomans, Athens was merely a small town (the 1833 census giving the population as 4000) full of ancient and Byzantine ruins, while Nafplio held the title of "the Capital of Greece". It was nowhere near its former glory. All this changed when King Otto of Bavaria (a huge ancient Greece nerd who had studied Classical Literature) decided that Athens should be instead, for its glorious past and for being the "Cradle of Hellenic Civilization". Once he removed the title of "Royal Seat and Capital", constructions started immediately and slowly the city came to be revived, aided in part by the violence of the Ottoman Empire in its final decades, where territories became separate and populations were transferred between Independent Greece and Turkey. Muslims who had long settled in Athens at that time were deported to Turkey and Greeks in Turkey, whether from Smyrna (at the time the largest Greek city, until it was subject to a devastating fire), Anatolia, and the Pontus came and settled in Greece, eventually ending up in Athens. The Germans and some Italians occupied the city during World War II, causing a famine as part of the usual wartime problems, while also facing a number of issues under the Greek Dictators of the early to mid-20th Century.
The city recovered upon Greece becoming a democracy and it has since expanded and now was a city of 140,000 residents with great buildings and important archeological sites, and the commercial and cultural intellectual center of the country. It held the "Modern Olympic Games" twice, first, in 1896 and later, in 2004, after failing to secure the centenary 1996 bid due to rampant pollution problems at the time. Thankfully investments from the European Union yielded a significant improvement in only 8 years and has now become a metropolis. Its port (the Piraeus) is the second biggest in the world and the biggest in Europe, though a good part of it is owned and supported COSCO, a shipping company that is owned and managed by the People's Republic of China, who are also philhellenic themselves.
Athens In Fiction
Due to being the capital of Greece, Athens appears in a lot of works of Greek fiction. Here are some examples:
- Konstantinou Kai Elenis
- Savvatogenneimenes
- To Soi Sou
- Democracy
- Erotocritos
- Lysistrata
- Hippolytus
- Eumenides
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Timon of Athens
- 300: Rise of an Empire
- Logicomix
- O Megalos Peripatos Tou Petrou
- Min Arxizeis Tin Mourmoura
- H Polykatoikia
- Ta Kalitera Mas Xronia
- Jason Bourne
- Asterix at the Olympic Games
- Unico
Tropes Associated with Athens
Notable Athenians
Defined as people born and raised in areas now part of the modern metropolitan area, or who worked there for significant periods.
- Aeschylus
- Alcibiades
- Giannis Antetokounmpo
- Aristophanes
- Aristotle — born and raised in northern Greece, but made his initial reputation in Athens
- Plato
- Socrates
- Sophocles
- Thucydides
- Xenophon
- Pericles
- Solon - One of Athens's first lawgivers and of the Seven Sages of Greece
- Aliki Vougiouklaki - Greece's most famous actress, well known for her blonde hair and for starring in many, many films of the 1960s
- Peisistratus - charismatic tyrant
- Cleisthenes - "The Father of the Athenian Democracy"
- Miltiades - general, famous for his victory at the Battle of Marathon
- Cimon - Miltiades' son and a prominent general
- Themistocles - a trickster statesman, remembered for his victory at the Battle of Salamis
- Aspasia - born in Miletus, Pericles' mistress and one of the few prominent women of Ancient Athens
- Phocion - elected general for 45 years straight
- Demosthenes - orator, Phillip of Macedon's greatest enemy and Cicero's main inspiration
- Theseus - mythical king of Athens
- Irene of Athens - empress of the Byzantine Empire
- Melina Mercouri - actress, singer and politician