History of Athens
is one of the oldest named cities in the world, having been continuously inhabited for perhaps 5,000 years. Situated in southern Europe, Athens became the leading city of ancient Greece in the first millennium BC, and its cultural achievements during the 5th century BC laid the foundations of Western civilization.
The earliest evidence for human habitation in Athens dates back to the Neolithic period. The Acropolis served as a fortified center during the Mycenaean era. By the 8th century BC, Athens had evolved into a prominent city-state, or polis, within the region of Attica. The 7th and 6th centuries BC saw the establishment of legal codes, such as those by Draco, Solon and Cleisthenes, which aimed to address social inequalities and set the stage for the development of democracy.
In the early 5th century BC, Athens played a central role in repelling Persian invasions and subsequently established its hegemony over other city-states through the formation of the Delian League. Under the leadership of Pericles, the city experienced a period of prosperity and cultural flourishing known as the Golden Age. This era saw the construction of significant architectural works, such as the Parthenon, and advancements in philosophy, drama, and the arts, establishing Athens as a center of classical civilization. The Peloponnesian War against Sparta ended in Athenian defeat and marked a decline in its political power. Nevertheless, under Hellenistic and Roman rule, Athens retained its status as a center of learning, attracting students and philosophers from across the empire.
During the early Middle Ages, the city experienced a decline, then recovered under the later Byzantine Empire and was relatively prosperous during the period of the Crusades, benefiting from Italian trade. Following a period of sharp decline under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Athens in the 19th century as the capital of the independent and self-governing Greek state.
Name
The name of Athens, connected to the name of its patron goddess Athena, originates from an earlier Pre-Greek language. The origin myth explaining how Athens acquired this name through the legendary contest between Poseidon and Athena was described by Herodotus, Apollodorus, Ovid, Plutarch, Pausanias and others. It even became the theme of the sculpture on the west pediment of the Parthenon. Both Athena and Poseidon requested to be patrons of the city and to give their name to it, so they competed with offering the city one gift each. Poseidon produced a spring by striking the ground with his trident, symbolizing naval power.File:Reconstruction of the west pediment of the Parthenon 1.jpg|thumb|upright=2|The contest of Athena and Poseidon, West Pediment of the Parthenon
Athena created the olive tree, symbolizing peace and prosperity. The Athenians, under their ruler Cecrops, accepted the olive tree and named the city after Athena. A sacred olive tree said to be the one created by the goddess was still kept on the Acropolis at the time of Pausanias. It was located by the temple of Pandrosus, next to the Parthenon. According to Herodotus, the tree had been burnt down during the Persian Wars, but a shoot sprung from the stump. The Greeks saw this as a symbol that Athena still had her mark there on the city.
Plato, in his dialogue Cratylus, offers an etymology of Athena's name connecting it to the phrase ἁ θεονόα or hē theoû nóēsis.
Geographical setting
There is evidence that the site on which the Acropolis stands was first inhabited in the Neolithic period, perhaps as a defensible settlement, around the end of the fourth millennium BC or a little later. The site is a natural defensive position which commands the surrounding plains. It is located about inland from the Saronic Gulf, in the centre of the Cephisian Plain, a fertile valley surrounded by rivers. To the east lies Mount Hymettus, to the north Mount Pentelicus.Ancient Athens, in the first millennium BC, occupied a very small area compared to the sprawling metropolis of modern Greece. The ancient walled city encompassed an area measuring about two kilometres from east to west and slightly less than that from north to south, although at its peak the ancient city had suburbs extending well beyond these walls. The Acropolis was situated just south of the centre of this walled area.
The Agora, the commercial and social centre of the city, lay about 400 m north of the Acropolis, in what is now the Monastiraki district. The hill of the Pnyx, where the Athenian Assembly met, lay at the western end of the city. The Eridanus river flowed through the city.
One of the most important religious sites in ancient Athens was the Temple of Athena, known today as the Parthenon, which stood on top of the Acropolis, where its evocative ruins still stand. Two other major religious sites, the Temple of Hephaestus and the Temple of Olympian Zeus or Olympeion, also lay within the city walls.
Origins and early history
Athens has been inhabited from Neolithic times, possibly from the end of the fourth millennium BC, or over 5,000 years. By 1412 BC, the settlement had become an important center of the Mycenaean civilization and the Acropolis was the site of a major Mycenaean fortress whose remains can be recognised from sections of the characteristic Cyclopean walls. On the summit of the Acropolis, below the later Erechtheion, cuttings in the rock have been identified as the location of a Mycenaean palace. Between 1250 and 1200 BC, to feed the needs of the Mycenaean settlement, a staircase was built down a cleft in the rock to reach a water supply that was protected from enemy incursions, comparable to similar works carried out at Mycenae.Unlike other Mycenaean centers, such as Mycenae and Pylos, it is unclear whether Athens suffered destruction in about 1200 BC, an event traditionally attributed to a Dorian invasion. The Athenians always maintained that they were 'pure' Ionians with no Dorian element. However, Athens, like many other Bronze Age settlements, went into economic decline for around 150 years following this.
Iron Age burials, in the Kerameikos and other locations, are often richly provided for and demonstrate that from 900 BC onwards Athens was one of the leading centres of trade and prosperity in the region; as were Lefkandi in Euboea and Knossos in Crete. This position may well have resulted from its central location in the Greek world, its secure stronghold on the Acropolis and its access to the sea, which gave it a natural advantage over inland rivals such as Thebes and Sparta.
Founding myths
According to legend, Athens was formerly ruled by kings, a situation which may have continued up until the 9th century BC. From later accounts, it is believed that these kings stood at the head of a land-owning aristocracy known as the Eupatridae, whose instrument of government was a Council which met on the Hill of Ares, called the Areopagus and appointed the chief city officials, the archons and the polemarch. The most famous king of Athens was Theseus, a prominent figure in Greek Mythology who killed the Minotaur. A slightly different mythical version of Athens' past is given in Plato's dialogue Timaeus. In this dialogue, a story is told about information given to Athenian leader Solon from Egyptian priests of the goddess Neith while he visited Egypt, according to which a well advanced Athenian state was established 9,000 years prior to his time that preceded Egypt's oldest kingdom by a thousand years. The laws of that state were the most just and largely inspired the various kings of Egypt when making laws for their kingdom. This story is not supported by any scholarly evidence, as no Athenian state is known to have existed during the 10th millennium BC. In addition, no evidence exists of any possible cultural or other ties between Egypt and any part of present-day Greece at such early a date.Archaic period
During the 1st millennium BC, Athens succeeded in bringing the other towns of Attica under its rule. This process of synoikismosthe bringing together into one homecreated the largest and wealthiest state on the Greek mainland, but it also created a larger class of people excluded from political life by the nobility. By the 7th century BC, social unrest had become widespread, and the Areopagus appointed Draco to draft a strict new code of law. When this failed, they appointed Solon with a mandate to create a new constitution in 594 BC.The reforms that Solon initiated dealt with both political and economic issues. The economic power of the Eupatridae was reduced by forbidding the enslavement of Athenian citizens as a punishment for debt, by breaking up large landed estates and freeing up trade and commerce, which allowed the emergence of a prosperous urban trading class. Politically, Solon divided the Athenians into four classes, based on their wealth and their ability to perform military service. The poorest class, the Thetai, who formed the majority of the population, received political rights for the first time and were able to vote in the Ecclesia. But only the upper classes could hold political office. The Areopagus continued to exist but its powers were reduced.
The new system laid the foundations for what eventually became Athenian democracy, but in the short term, it failed to quell class conflict, and after twenty years of unrest, the popular party, led by Peisistratos, seized power. Peisistratos is usually called a tyrant, but the Greek word tyrannos does not mean a cruel and despotic ruler, merely one who took power by force. Peisistratos was in fact a very popular ruler, who made Athens wealthy, powerful, and a centre of culture. He preserved the Solonian Constitution, but made sure that he and his family held all the offices of state.
Peisistratus built the first aqueduct tunnel at Athens, which most likely had its sources on the slopes of Mount Hymettos and along the Ilissos river. It supplied, among other structures, the fountain house in the southeast corner of the Agora, but it had a number of branches. In the 4th century BC it was replaced by a system of terracotta pipes in a stone-built underground channel, sometimes called the Hymettos aqueduct; many sections had round, oval or square access holes on top of about.
Pipe segments of this system are displayed at the Evangelismos and Syntagma Metro stations.
Peisistratos died in 527 BC and was succeeded by his sons Hippias and Hipparchus. They proved to be much less adept rulers and in 514 BC, Hipparchus was assassinated in a private dispute over a young man. This led Hippias to establish a real dictatorship, which proved very unpopular. He was overthrown in 510 BC. A radical politician with an aristocratic background named Cleisthenes then took charge, and it was he who established democracy in Athens.
The reforms of Cleisthenes replaced the traditional four phyle with ten new ones, named after legendary heroes and having no class basis; they were in fact electorates. Each phyle was in turn divided into three trittyes and each trittys had one or more demes, which became the basis of local government. The phyle each elected fifty members to the Boule, a council which governed Athens on a day-to-day basis. The Assembly was open to all citizens and was both a legislature and a supreme court, except in murder cases and religious matters, which became the only remaining functions of the Areopagus.
Most public offices were filled by lot, although the ten strategoi were elected. This system remained remarkably stable and, with a few brief interruptions, it remained in place for 170 years, until Philip II of Macedon defeated Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC.