Athens, City-State of
State | Defunct
404 BCE to 86 BCE
The city of Athens during the classical period of Ancient Greece (508–322 BCE) is a notable polis (city-state) of Attica, Greece, leading the Delian League in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and the Peloponnesian League.
Athenian democracy is established in 508 BC under Cleisthenes following the tyranny of Hippias.
This system remains remarkably stable, and with a few brief interruptions remains in place for 180 years, until 322 BCE (aftermath of Lamian War).
The peak of Athenian hegemony is achieved in the 440s to 430s BCE, known as the Age of Pericles.In the classical period, Athens is a center for the arts, learning and philosophy.
Home of Plato's Akademia and Aristotle's Lyceum, Athens is also the birthplace of Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles, and many other prominent philosophers, writers and politicians of the ancient world.
It is widely referred to as the cradle of Western Civilization, and the birthplace of democracy, largely due to the impact of its cultural and political achievements during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE on the rest of the then known European continent.
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Athens is inhabited but not wealthy.
Although Athens shows indications of occupation in the Early and Middle Bronze ages (3000-1500 BCE), the earliest buildings date from the Late Bronze Age, particularly about 1200 BCE when the Acropolis is the citadel.
Around its top is built a massive wall of cyclopean masonry (a type of construction using huge blocks without mortar).
The construction of this wall probably marks the union of the twelve towns of Attica (the department in which Athens lies) under the leadership of Athens, an event traditionally ascribed to Theseus.
The palace of the king is in the area of the later Erechtheum (but almost no traces of it have been identified.)
The town, insofar as it is outside the Acropolis, lies to the south (where wells and slight remains of houses have been found).
The principal cemetery lies to the northwest (and several richly furnished chamber tombs and many smaller ones have been discovered in the area that will later become the Agora.)
Whether through the strength of its walls, the valor of its citizens, or its geographical position away from the main route to the Peloponnesus, Athens seems to have weathered the Late Bronze and Early Iron ages, troubled times, better than other, more important centers.
The growing crisis in Athens has forced most Athenians into debt; many have been sold into slavery to foreign lands.
The Athenian oligarchs, facing a serious economic crisis and the possibility of a revolt by the common people against their unpopular rule, give Solon, a well-intentioned liberal aristocrat who had had already held office as archon about 594 BCE, unique powers as “diallaktes,” or mediator, granting him absolute authority to remedy the grave ills afflicting Athens.
His first concern is to relieve the immediate distress caused by debt.
He redeems all the forfeited land and frees all the enslaved citizens, probably by fiat.
Solon in one of his poems describes this measure, known popularly as the “shaking off of burdens”: “These things the black earth … could best witness for the judgment of posterity; from whose surface I plucked up the marking-stones [probably signs of the farmers' indebtedness] planted all about, so that she who was enslaved is now free.
And I brought back to Athens … many who had been sold, justly or unjustly, or who had fled under the constraint of debt, wandering far afield and no longer speaking the Attic tongue; and I freed those who suffered shameful slavery here and trembled at their masters' whims.”
Solon also prohibits for the future all loans secured on the borrower's person, but refuses to go to the length demanded by the poor, which is to redistribute the land.
Instead, he passes measures designed to increase the general prosperity and to provide alternative occupations for those unable to live by farming: e.g., trades and professions are encouraged; the export of produce other than olive oil is forbidden (so much grain has been exported that not enough remains to feed the population of Attica); the circulation of coined money (invented in Solon's lifetime) is stimulated by the minting of a native Athenian coinage on a more suitable standard than that of the coins of neighbors, which had been used hitherto; and new weights and measures are introduced.
Evagoras, another Greek Cypriot, establishes himself as king of Salamis in 411 BCE and works for a united Cyprus that will be closely tied to the Greek states.
By force and by guile, the new king brings other Cypriot kingdoms into line and leads forces against Persia.
He also allies the Cypriots with Athens, and the Athenians honor him with a statue in the agora.
As the Salamisian king gains prominence and power in the eastern Mediterranean (even attacking Persian positions in Anatolia), the Persians try to rid themselves of this threat and eventually defeat the Cypriots.
Evagoras manages through diplomacy to retain the throne of Salamis, but the carefully nurtured union of the Cypriot kingdoms is dissolved.
Cyprus remains divided at the end of his thirty-seven-year reign, but Evagoras is revered as a Greek Cypriot of uncommon accomplishment.
He has brought artists and learned men to his court and fostered Greek studies.
He has been instrumental in having the ancient Cypriot syllabary replaced by the Greek alphabet.
He has issued coins of Greek design and in general furthered the integration of Greek and Cypriot culture.
The most devastating intra-Greek war is the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), won by Sparta and marking the demise of the Athenian Empire as the leading power in ancient Greece.
Both Athens and Sparta are later overshadowed by Thebes and eventually Macedon, with the latter uniting the Greek world in the League of Corinth (also known as the Hellenic League or Greek League) under the guidance of Phillip II, who is elected leader of the first unified Greek state in history.
Pausanias the Spartan had led Hellenic forces against the Persians in 478 BCE following the defeat of Xerxes' invasion of Greece.
He is an unpopular commander (who may have conspired with the Persians), and although he had been cleared of all accusations of conspiracy, Sparta, eager to stop prosecuting the war, had decided to remain outside the war against Persia, as Spartans regard the liberation of the Greek cities in Asia Minor as having fulfilled the war's purpose.
Conversely, the Athenians, who feel related to the Ionian Greeks, had wanted not merely to free them but to continue the war in order to provide security to the Greeks in Asia Minor.
As a consequence, Sparta had surrendered the leadership of the ongoing campaign to Athens, which is eager to accept it.
Thus, the Delian League, formed in 477, comes under the military leadership of the Athenians.
An association of Greek city-state around the Aegean Sea had offered their allegiance at Delos, through Aristides, to Athens.
They had formed the Delian League (also known as the Confederacy of Delos) in 478 BCE with the Athenian strategos Cimon, a celebrated hero of the Battle of Salamis, as their principal commander, their purpose to continue fighting Persia after the Greek victory in the Battle of Plataea.
The League’s official aim is, according to Thucydides (1.96), to "avenge the wrongs they suffered by ravaging the territory of the king."
League members swear to have the same friends and enemies, and drop ingots of iron into the sea to symbolize the permanence of their alliance.
Polygnotus, a native of Thasos who had been adopted by the Athenians and admitted to their citizenship, is probably the first classical painter to depict spatial depth in a realistic style.
He paints for the Athenians in the time of Cimon a picture of the taking of Ilium on the walls of the Stoa Poecile, and another of the marriage of the daughters of Leucippus in the Anaceum.
Plutarch mentioned that historians and the poet Melanthius attested Polygnotus as not having painted for money but out of charitable feeling to the Athenian people.
In the hall at the entrance to the Acropolis other works of his were preserved.
The most important, however, of his paintings were his frescoes in a building erected at Delphi by the people of Cnidus.
The subjects of these were the visit to Hades by Odysseus, and the taking of Ilium.
His pupil Micon’s celebrated paintings, produced in collaboration with Polygnotus for the “Stoa Poikile” (“Painted Stoa,” an art gallery, since destroyed) in the Athenian Agora, portray the battle of Marathon and a battle with the Amazons.
Cratinus, a celebrated Athenian writer of comedies whose subjects are political, religious, literary, and mythological, makes Pericles a favorite target of his inventive and exuberant satire.
The newest Athenian colony is disconcertingly close to another outpost of Corinthian influence at Potidaea in the Chalcidice, and there is a possibility that Athens subjects Potidaea itself to financial pressure by the mid-430s.
An anomaly in being both tributary to Athens and simultaneously subject to direct rule by magistrates sent out annually by Corinth, Potidaea clearly is a sensitive spot in international relations.