Greeks like Xenophon admired the empire, despite the fact that his Persian adventures exposed its military weakness and helped give it a misleading reputation for effeminacy and decadence. If we set on one side an elite force like the Immortals, much of the Persian army was a multitudinous if not very militant militia, which was no match for highly professional Greek mercenaries. Great Kings were happy to recruit hoplites to stiffen their hordes.
—
Athens grew to greatness against a background of favorable economic conditions and unfavorable foreign threats. From the eighth century onwards, Greeks sent merchants sailing around the Mediterranean, opening them up to diverse cultural influences. Population growth led to the establishment of overseas colonies. International trade became essential for Athens when the number of its citizens required more food than its farmers were able to supply, and the city was forced to rely on grain imports from the Black Sea.
The historical record shows that after the establishment of democracy a booming Athens was suffused with energy and creativity. It seems likely that there was a causal connection. The system of direct democracy not only demanded, enforced even, popular participation and communal religious observance, but offered individual citizens an opportunity, perhaps unique in history, to mold their political destiny at first hand.
The fact that the polis was small (although not as small as Plato and Aristotle would have liked) enhanced the felt excitement of the process. The individual and the collective were interlinked and mutually magnified. The Athenian was free, but the state could also be pitiless towards him in return, as (in their different ways) the careers of Socrates, Alcibiades, and others go to show.
Love of liberty was a value of cardinal importance, which the democracy fed and watered. It was the foundation for rational inquiry and free artistic expression. It also inspired (positively) the Greeks’ ferocious resistance to the Persians and (negatively) their own internecine quarrels.
Small wonder that this fertile soil produced a flowering of extraordinary personalities, and great art and thought. The Hellenic city-states took advantage of a briefly opened window of opportunity. They were too small and weak to survive for very long when surrounded by stronger and larger neighbors.
However, for the time that the fates allowed, Athens made the most of her chances.
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After Alexander’s death in 323, his empire quickly broke apart into the great kingdoms of the Hellenistic age—Macedon, Egypt, the imperial heartland in Asia, and in fourth place, Pergamum.
Athens was reduced to being a walk-on political actor inside the Macedonian sphere of influence. The place became rather dilapidated; the Long Walls between Athens and Piraeus collapsed and were not rebuilt. The city would never again be a full and free democracy with universal adult male suffrage. It would never again dominate the seas with its fleets, although from time to time trade picked up and Piraeus remained a major international port. The city’s unique selling point was as a center for higher education, specializing in rhetoric and philosophy. For centuries young Greeks and, later, Romans spent a year or so in Athens completing their education.
Athens had no alternative but to rest on its laurels. In fact, “laurels” were all that it had: with its temples, its colonnades, its colossal statues of Athena, and its open-air murals, it was a memorial of its own glorious past, a historical theme park packed with tourists.
The city faced competition. Under the Ptolemies, the Macedonian pharaohs, Alexandria became a sophisticated and deluxe metropolis. The state-sponsored museum was an academic center for poetry, scholarship, and the sciences. Its vast library sought to collect every Greek book ever written.
So the idea of Greece shifted from the antiquated mainland poleis to the modern Hellenistic kingdoms of the Middle East. Then in the second century these were absentmindedly conquered by the Roman Republic. In 87 Athens, implicated in an uprising against Rome, was besieged and sacked by the Roman general Sulla. A generation later, the city chose the wrong side in Rome’s civil war. Julius Caesar, the victor, pardoned it, remarking drily: “How often will the glory of your ancestors save you from self-destruction?”
Good question. Under various Roman emperors, among them Augustus and Hadrian, grand new public buildings were commissioned. In the latter’s reign, the temple of Olympian Zeus, enormous but incomplete since the time of Pisistratus, was finished at last in A.D. 132.
A century later Athens was sacked again. It never recovered. Many of its major buildings lay in ruins. The population dwindled. The city became little more than the Acropolis. Successive Gothic invasions washed over it. Weeds grew in the pavements of the Parthenon. A resident Christian archbishop in the late twelfth century described Athens as “a God-forsaken hole.” He wrote a friend:
You cannot look upon Athens without weeping. It is not just that she has lost her ancient glory: that was taken from her long ago. But now she has lost the very form, appearance and character of a city. Everywhere you see walls stripped and demolished, houses razed to the ground, their sites ploughed under.
As Byzantium gave way to the Ottoman Empire, Athens was a small impoverished community. The Parthenon became a mosque and sheep, donkeys, and camels grazed in the agora. In the seventeenth century, in a war between Venetians and the Turks, the temple was used as an arsenal and was blown up by enemy fire.
In the nineteenth century Lord Elgin removed marble masterpieces from what was left of the Parthenon. The Greeks fought for and, with European help, won their independence. Romantic poets made Hellenic liberty their cause. Shelley said: “We are all Greeks.” Lord Byron joined the insurgents and died on campaign of a violent fever and incompetent doctors in 1824.
In 1834 the victorious revolutionaries chose Athens as their capital. For the first time in two millennia, the violet-crowned city was free.
HEROES OF HOMER
The
Iliad,
an epic poem composed toward the end of the eighth century
B.C.
, was a bible that set out ideals of courage, honor, loyalty, and the competitive pursuit of excellence that generation after generation of Greeks sought to realize in their lives. The hero of the
Iliad,
Achilles, chose to be a warrior, win glory, and die young rather than lead a long, peaceful but ignoble life. Here he bandages the arm of his friend and lover, Patroclus, who has been wounded by an arrow.
Attic red-figure vase by the Sosias Painter, about 500
B.C.
, Altes Museum, Berlin
.
ATHENS IN ITS GLORY
A reconstruction of the Acropolis, the citadel of Athens, as it was at the beginning of the fourth century, after the completion of the Parthenon and the other great buildings of the age of Pericles. A. Parthenon; B. Erechtheum; C. Propylaea or monumental gateway; D. Art Gallery; E. Temple of Athena Nike (Victory); F. Ramp; G. House of the Arrephoroi; H. Clepsydra fountain; I. Eleusinium, a shrine for the Eleusinian Mysteries; J.
Agora,
or marketplace; K. Areopagus, or the “Rock of Ares,” a hill where the council of the Areopagus met; L. Theater of Dionysus; M. Unfinished Temple of Olympian Zeus.
Akg-images, Peter Connolly
.
HOUSE OF THE VIRGIN