History of Athens

ATHENA'S CITY
Athens (Athēnai in Ancient Greek; Athina in Modern Greek) is said to be named for the Greek goddess Athena.

According to Greek mythology, Zeus, the ruler of the gods, staged a contest between Athena and the sea god Poseidon to choose a patron for the city.

In one version of the story, the people judged Athena’s gift of an olive tree more useful to humanity than Poseidon’s gift of a freshwater spring, and they dedicated their city to her.

( Athena Promachos )
Athena was the ancient city’s divine protector, represented for centuries by a giant seated bronze statue (Athena Promachos) near the entrance to the Acropolis and by a standing ivory and gold statue (Athena Parthenos) inside the Parthenon.

( Athena Partenos )
Both of these masterpieces, created by the famed Greek sculptor Phidias in the 5th century bc, are now destroyed.

( The Parthenon )
The main temple to Athena on the Acropolis, the Parthenon, also served as the city’s treasury, and it became the crowning symbol of ancient Greek civilization.

EARLIEST ORIGINS
The Acropolis of Athens has been inhabited since Neolithic times.

( The Acropolis )
As early as 1400 bc it was fortified in the manner of Mycenae, Tiryns, and other late Bronze Age citadels.

At that time and in the subsequent “dark age” (1200-900 bc) that followed widespread warring among the Mycenaean Greeks, Athens was one of a number of petty states in Attica.

THE EARLY CITY-STATE
In the mid-9th century bc, the surrounding territory, including the nearby seaport of Piraeus, was incorporated into the city-state of Athens.

( Seaport of Piraeus )
When the monarchy was replaced by an aristocracy of nobles, the common people had few rights.

The city was controlled by the Areopagus (Council of Elders), who appointed three (later nine) magistrates, or archons.

The archons were responsible for the conduct of war, religion, and law. Discontent with this system led to a short-lived dictatorship by Cylon (632 bc).

Continued unrest in Athens led to the imposition of the Draconian Code, a harsh code of laws enacted in 621 bc and named for Athenian lawgiver Draco.

The code initially compounded the social and economic crises in Athens, but eventually it brought about the consensus appointment of Solon as chief archon in 594 bc.

Solon established a council (boulé), a popular assembly (ekklesía), and law courts.

He also encouraged trade, reformed the coinage, and invited foreign business people to the city.

Although his reforms were only partially successful, they are widely considered to be the foundations of Athenian democracy.

In 560 bc the tyrant Pisistratus, supported by the aristocracy, gained control of Athens.

He enlarged the meeting place of Solon’s council in the agora (marketplace) and built a new temple of Athena on the Acropolis.

Pisistratus also sponsored public events such as the festival of Greater Panathenaea, held every fourth year in Athena’s honor.

Many other public works were undertaken by the tyrant and his sons between 560 and 510 bc.

The sons of Pisistratus did not enjoy the popularity of their father, however, and eventually fell from power: Hipparchus was assassinated about 514 BC, and Hippias was exiled in 510 bc.

In 509 bc Cleisthenes led a democratic revolution. He reorganized the city’s tribal structure and consolidated a base of support in the more democratic urban center of Athens and in Piraeus.

( Pnyx Hill )
The powerful popular assembly met on the Pnyx hill below the Acropolis.

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD
During the Persian Wars (490-479 bc), the Persian Empire attempted to conquer the Greek city-states.

In 480 bc Athens was sacked and nearly destroyed by the Persians under King Xerxes I after Athenians had abandoned the city.

Shortly afterward, the Athenian leader Themistocles defeated the Persian invaders at the decisive naval Battle of Salamís.

The Greeks secured their independence after a final battle against the Persians at the Battle of Plataea in 479 bc.

Themistocles then began to restore the city, building circuit walls around both Athens and Piraeus. He also began construction of the Long Walls connecting Athens with the port. His work was continued by Pericles in the 450s bc.

Pericles, more than any other democratic leader, made Athens a great city. His period in office is often called the Golden Age of Athens or the Age of Pericles.

Public funds were used to build the Parthenon, the temple of Nike, the Erechtheum, and other great monuments.

He developed the agora, which began to display imported goods from around the known world, and he further fortified the protective walls that connected the city to Piraeus.

As head of the Delian League of Greek city-states, Athens was now an imperial power; its courts tried legal disputes from all over the Aegean region.

Under Pericles, Athens experienced an extraordinary cultural flowering. Great tragedies and comedies were produced in the Theater of Dionysus, below the Acropolis.

Among the famous figures active in Athens at the time were the architects Callicrates and Ictinus, the sculptors Phidias and Alcamenes, the painters Polygnotus and Apollodorus, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the philosophers Anaxagoras and Protagoras, and the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

The city, with its democratic constitution and brilliant culture, became known as the school of Hellas.

At its height, the population of Athens was perhaps 200,000 people, of whom 50,000 males were citizens; the rest—including women, foreigners, and slaves—were not granted citizenship.

Military service and property ownership were the two basic conditions for citizenship in Athens.

When freeborn males turned 18, they were required to attend military school for two years, after which they became full-fledged citizens of Athens.

Thereafter, they could be called for military duty until they reached the age of 60.

The imperial policies and ambitions of Athens, however, helped bring on the destructive Peloponnesian War (431-404 bc) with its archrival Sparta.

During the conflict, the Spartans ravaged the surrounding countryside while Athenians held out behind their city’s walls. The walls allowed food and supplies from Piraeus to reach the city.

An epidemic struck the crowded urban populace beginning in 430 bc and eventually killed thousands, including Pericles.

Risky military actions by the Athenians resulted in the destruction of their fleet and army at Syracuse in 413 bc after they attempted to invade Sicily, an ally of Sparta.

The final defeat of Athens came in 405 bc at the naval Battle of Aegospotami, and the city surrendered in 404 bc.

The victorious Spartans imposed their own leadership, and they removed most of the city’s fortifications, including the Long Walls.

Importantly, Sparta chose not to destroy Athens itself nor enslave its inhabitants. Athens survived the war but had lost its empire and its democracy.

A democratic coup against the pro-Spartan Thirty Tyrants restored democracy in Athens in 403 bc.

However, the string of defeats, betrayals, and disasters that had struck Athens deeply troubled many citizens, who saw a need to strengthen moral values and established religion in Athens.

In a famous incident, the great Greek philosopher Socrates was put on trial and forced to take his own life when he questioned traditional ideas. Although an attitude of pessimism prevailed, art and philosophy continued to flourish.

The sculptor Praxiteles and the painter Zeuxis created famous works. In the 4th century bc influential schools were founded by the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and Demosthenes, Isocrates, Lysias, and others made rhetoric a fine art.

Demosthenes also tried to rally the Athenians against the Macedonians, who had begun conquering their Greek neighbors. See also Western Philosophy.

FOREIGN DOMINATION
Philip II of Macedonia, father of Alexander the Great, defeated the Athenians and Thebans at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 bc, becoming the master of Greece.

Despite losing its independence to Macedonia, Athens remained an important cultural center and symbol of Greek civilization.

When Alexander the Great’s troops burned and looted the Persian capital of Persepolis in 330 bc, it was said to be in revenge for the destruction of Athens by the Persians in 480 bc.

Athens, along with most of Greece, fell to the Roman Empire in 146 bc. Athenians maintained good relations with the Romans.

However, Greek support for King Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus led to a new Roman invasion during the First Mithridatic War (88-84 bc).

Troops under the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla sacked Athens in 86 bc and destroyed many of the city’s monuments.

Nonetheless, Athens remained a center of learning for prominent Greeks and Romans from the 1st century bc until the 6th century ad.

Saint Paul arrived in Athens in ad 51 to preach Christianity. He reportedly debated with the city’s pagan philosophers , an event commemorated by a modern bronze plaque on the Areopagus.

In the 3rd century ad Athens was damaged by invading Goths, who were repelled with some difficulty.

After the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476, Greece became part of the Byzantine Empire, successor to the eastern Roman Empire.

In ad 529 the Christian Byzantine emperor Justinian I closed the pagan philosophical schools, virtually ending the city’s classical tradition.

During the Byzantine period Athens became a cultural backwater.

Many of the city’s artworks, including Phidias’s monumental statues of Athena, were moved to Constantinople (present-day İstanbul), and the temples became Christian churches.

Byzantine emperors occasionally visited Athens, but the city was largely ignored and impoverished.

After the Latin (Roman Catholic) Crusaders conquered Constantinople in 1204, Athens became a French feudal duchy.

The Catalans took over the city in 1311, but they were expelled when a Florentine dynasty successfully installed itself in the late 14th century.

The Ottoman Empire gained complete control of Athens in 1458 after the capture of Constantinople in 1453 and the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula.

The Parthenon, built as the major temple of the goddess Athena and later converted to a Christian church, was made into a Muslim mosque.

Under Ottoman rule the town was still run by Greeks and had a mixed population of Turks, Greeks, and Slavs.

The Parthenon was badly damaged in 1687, when a Venetian bombardment ignited gunpowder that had been stored inside the building.

THE MODERN PERIOD
The Greek War of Independence (1821-1829) liberated the city from Ottoman rule and made it the capital of modern Greece.

Athens was largely rebuilt during the reign (1832-1862) of King Otto I by German architects, notably Eduard Schaubert.

Before its emergence as a major European commercial and industrial center in the 20th century, Athens was important mainly as a tourism destination celebrated for its ancient monuments.

The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in the summer of 1896 as a way to promote a more peaceful world in the spirit of the ancient Olympic Games.

The ancient Olympics had taken place at Olympia west of Athens every four years from 776 bc until the late 4th century ad, when they were criticized as a pagan religious festival and banned by Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius I.


(1) Athens during the world wars
(2) Conflict and Recovery
(3) The 2004 Olympic Games