Copyright © 2016 by Anthony Everitt
Maps copyright © 2016 by David Lindroth, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Illustration Credits: “Athens Acropolis/Reconstruction”: akg-images/Peter Connolly; “Achilles and Patroclus,” “Plato,” “Hetairas”: Bibi Saint Pol; “Parthenon,” “Athena Relief”: Harrieta 171; “Athena Parthenos”: Dean Dixon; “Themistocles,” “Foundry”: Sailko; “Pericles,” “Athenian Hoplite,” “Discus Thrower”: Marie-Lan Nguyen; “Demosthenes”: Gunnar Bach Pedersen; “Greek and Persian Soldiers”: Alexikoua; “Helmet of Miltiades”: William Neuheisel; “Lion of Chaeronea”: Philipp Pilhofer; “Socrates”: Yair Haklkai; “Aristotle,” “Sacrificed Boar,” “Symposium”: Jastrow; “Baby and Mother”: Marsyas.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Everitt, Anthony, author.
Title: The rise of Athens: the story of the world’s greatest civilization / Anthony Everitt.
Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014843| ISBN 9780812994582 | ISBN 9780812994599 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Athens (Greece)—History.
Classification: LCC DF285 .E94 2016 | DDC 938/.5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014843
Ebook ISBN 9780812994599
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Anna Bauer Carr
Cover painting: Leo von Klenze, Ideal View of the Acropolis and the Areopagus in Athens, 1846 (Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich/bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, N.Y.)
v4.1
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
List of Maps
Introduction
Three’s Company
Chapter 1: National Hero
Chapter 2: A State of War
Chapter 3: The Persian Mule
The Invention of Democracy
Chapter 4: The Shaking-Off
Chapter 5: Friend of the Poor
Chapter 6: Charioteers of the Soul
Chapter 7: Inventing Democracy
The Persian Threat
Chapter 8: Eastern Raiders
Chapter 9: Fox as Hedgehog
Chapter 10: Invasion
Chapter 11: “The Acts of Idiots”
Chapter 12: “O Divine Salamis”
The Empire Builders
Chapter 13: League of Nations
Chapter 14: The Falling-Out
Chapter 15: The Kindly Ones
Chapter 16: “Crowned with Violets”
The Great War
Chapter 17: The Prisoners on the Island
Chapter 18: The Man Who Knew Nothing
Chapter 19: Downfall
Chapter 20: The End of Democracy?
A Long Farewell
Chapter 21: Sparta’s Turn
Chapter 22: Chaeronea—“Fatal to Liberty”
Chapter 23: Afterword—“A God-Forsaken Hole”
Photo Insert
Glossary
Time Line
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Sources
Bibliography
Notes
By Anthony Everitt
About the Author
PREFACE
As a small child I devoured a Victorian storybook that told tales of Greek and Roman mythology. I read every word, except for the sickly sweet poems that were scattered across its pages.
My paternal grandmother noticed my interest in the ancient world and bought me three Penguin Classics, then a new publishing enterprise. She chose E. V. Rieu’s versions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and a translation of Plato’s Symposium. A farmer’s wife, she was no classicist, and the last of these books came a little early for a prepubertal child, who was mystified by the references to Hellenic homosexuality. But I could not have been given a better sense, smell, flavor, of Greek civilization. Homer and Plato introduced me to a world that was new and ravishing, which, for all the tragedy and the bloodshed, radiated the sunlight and luminous skies of free thought.
For a span of two hundred years in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the ancient Athenians pioneered astonishing advances in almost every field of human endeavor. They invented the only real or complete democracy (the word itself is Greek) that has ever existed outside the classical age. Whereas we merely elect representatives to act on our behalf, citizens then met in assembly and took every important decision themselves. (I need to enter a reservation here: the franchise was limited to adult males and so excluded two large social groups—women and slaves.)
The Athenians believed in reason, and its power to solve the mysteries of the human condition and of nature. They established the concepts and language of philosophy, and raised issues with which today’s thinkers still wrestle. They pioneered the arts of tragedy and comedy, architecture and sculpture. They invented history as the accurate narration and interpretation of past events. With their fellow-Greeks they developed mathematics and the natural sciences.
We must beware of exaggeration. The Athenians were part of a general Hellenic advance and borrowed ideas and technologies from their non-Greek neighbors—for example, the Egyptians and the Persians—in spite of their vaunted scorn for “barbarians.” If only we knew as much about other societies in and around the Eastern Mediterranean in classical times as we do about them, they might not look to be quite so exceptional. We would probably have to make a lesser claim.
Nevertheless, even if the Athenians were not unique, that takes nothing away from the fact of what they did achieve. The greatness of Socrates will not be compromised by the discovery of a mute, inglorious counterpart.
Although Athenians were indeed rationalists, they were also deeply religious. Worship of the Olympian gods was integrated into every corner of daily life. Most of them believed these anthropomorphic divinities to be players in the great game of history quite as much as human beings.
We in the West complacently note that a fully independent Athenian democracy lasted only two hundred years or so. It is well to remember that our own democracies, in their complete form, have yet to last that long.
The mechanics of the Athenian democratic system are relevant to today’s electronic world: the arrival of the computer means that should we so wish we could move back from representative to direct democracy. As in the heyday of classical Athens the people would genuinely be able to take all important decisions. Each citizen would, in effect, be a member of the government. Are we brave enough to take such a rational step?
For all the wonders of ancient Athens, or rather because of them, I faced a fundamental question. How was it that this tiny community of 200,000 souls or so (in other words, no more populous than, say, York in England or Little Rock in Arkansas) managed to give birth to towering geniuses across the range of human endeavor and to create one of the greatest civilizations in history? Indeed, it laid the foundations of our own contemporary intellectual universe.
In my account of the city’s rise and fall I seek to answer this question—or at least to point towards an answer.
—
If we were able to travel back more than two millennia and walk the streets and alleys of ancient Athens, we might very well come across the master playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the sculptor Pheidias; the comedian Aristophanes; and the bad boy of Athenian politics, Alcibiades. Perhaps we overhear a class in ethics that Socrates is giving in a shoe shop on the edge of the agora and meet two of his students, Plato and Xenophon. At a citizens’ assembly we listen to a speech by that greatest of statesmen, Pericles.