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History of Athens |
When we talk about the history of Athens, we have to go back some 2.000 years when Athens was one of the several small independent city-states. Sometime around 621 BC, a legislator named Drako appeared on the Athenian scene and codified laws that substituted public justice for personal revenge, and thus outlawed the feuds that were a popular Greek pastime. His laws were so severe that the legislator has been immortalized by the word “draconian”. The laws were written in blood rather than ink, because he rewarded many types of crimes with the death penalty.
These laws held for only a quarter of a century until Solon, who came to be called the founder of Athenian democracy, abolished the death penalty for everything but murder.
Solon also instituted constitutional reforms that set up free elections and brought all classes, except slaves, into the process of government. And so democracy began.
A hundred years later democracy and everything else Greece had built up were threatened by Persia. The first of Persia’s expeditions took place in 490 BC when its army arrived at Marathon, near Athens. This was the event where a Greek soldier ran the 27 miles back to Athens, managed to gasp, “We have won”, then collapsed and died.
In their second expedition the Persians were matched by the genius of Themistokles, an Athenian leader who made his people nervous by going out and building a huge fleet rather than an army. However, he turned out to be right: the Persians were blasted off the sea at the battle of Salamis, off the coast near Athens.
Athens, now a naval power, was headed for its golden age. Its ruler at this time, around the middle of the fifth century BC, was Perikles, the most dazzling orator in a city of dazzling orators. He practiced democracy at home, imperialism abroad. One of his wisest decisions was to pay jurors, so that even the poorest citizens could sit on juries. One of his not -so- smart decisions was to restrict Athenian citizenship to people whose mother and father were both Athenians.
It was Perikles who built the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the long walls to Piraeus and many of the temples you’ll see on your strolls around the capital. This was quite a time for Athens. While Perikles was building his Parthenon, Aeschylus, Sophokles and Euripides were writing their plays, and Socrates and Plato were teaching. Athens was then involved in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta and 27 years of fighting led to Athens’ defeat in 404 BC. But victorious Sparta’s influence lasted only 30 years after; it was then superseded by Macedonia, a kingdom in the north of Greece.
Philip's of Macedonia ambition was to unify all of Greece, restore Greek culture to Macedonia, and eliminate Persia as a lingering threat. Next in line in the throne was his first wife’s son, Alexander the Great, who has studied under Aristotle. Alexander’s death marked the end of the great classical period of Greece in literature, philosophy and art. The city-states like Athens withered, the upper classes took over, and there was constant bickering and batting until 146 BC when Greece was conquered by the powerful and indomitable armies of Rome.
For 500 years, right through the early era of Christianity, Athens was subject to the power of Rome. For most practical purposes the history of classical Greece ends at this point. Tourists come to Athens and Greece mainly to see the remains of the classical ruins, and to relive the days of glory of Perikles and the Athenians. That’s what Greece is all about.
Obviously, though, its history continues. For many hundreds of years, Byzantium was the only civilized part of Europe. Art, especially religious art, flourished, and churches, monasteries and palaces were going up everywhere including the Athens area. Then the Eastern and Western churches separated; Venetians, Franks, and soldiers from other countries in Western Europe formed their crusades and Greece was reduced to an insignificant province, and Athens became a small town. The Parthenon was turned into a Turkish mosque.
For the next 400 years, Greece remained under Turkish rule. In the early 1800s, the Greeks started to muster groups of revolutionaries, and in March 1821, they formally began their struggle for independence marked on March 25th as Greek Independence Day. In 1829 Greece was declared an independent nation.
A number of modern-day conflicts (Balkan and world wars) left Greece at times in other hands, but today the country is a republic with a democratically elected parliament. Regimes may come and go, but the glory that was Greece and Athens remains.
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