The Rise of Athens

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.

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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.

This is the Athens I evoke, beginning with its early centuries of kings, tyrants, and aristocrats, moving on to the invention of democracy and the city’s political and cultural heyday, and concluding with its decline into a pleasant “university town.”

The story is much less well known than that of Rome, but it had just as great an influence on posterity, on today’s Western civilization, in a word, on us. The Athenians laid the foundations of the house in which we live today. We ought to remember and celebrate what they built. And what a story it is—crammed with adventure and astounding reversals of fortune.

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On the game board of Eastern Mediterranean politics from the sixth to the fourth century B.C., there were three main players.

The first of these was Athens. It was a maritime rather than a land power and encouraged trade throughout the known world. Its fleets came to dominate the Aegean Sea. Its citizens bought and sold goods and services, were devoted to culture and the arts, and were inquisitive and open-minded.

Sparta was different in every way, one of the strangest societies in the history of the world. A city-state in the Peloponnese, the peninsula that makes up southern Greece, it was highly disciplined and dedicated to warfare. It was widely recognized as the leading Greek power. Male citizens lived collectively and spent much of their lives in communal messes. Called Spartiates or (to deny them their individuality) Equals, they were forbidden to farm or trade, and were brought up to be professional soldiers. They conquered much of the Peloponnese and enslaved its population as serfs, or helots. These helots served their masters by working their estates for them; they were regularly humiliated and could be put to death at will.

Young Spartiates were trained brutally to be brutal. The aim was to turn them into pitiless fighters, to abjure personal wealth, and to be silent, modest, and polite. Theirs was a self-sufficient community—closed, dour, and totalitarian—with little interest in the outside world.