Welcome to Athens in 416 BC. The month is Elaphebolion, just before the theatrical festival of the Great Dionysia (early April). At this time, the urban population of Athens is around 30,000, with a greater concentration of geniuses per square foot than at any other time in human history.
As the city hovers on the brink of the fateful war that will destroy its golden age, we spend twenty-four hours with regular Athenians who occasionally encounter some of the city’s great men – not as paragons of intellectual ability but as people with very human concerns. After all, geniuses spend little time being geniuses. Mostly they are normal people who go to the bathroom, argue with their spouses and enjoy a drink with friends.
In most ancient texts we meet the ordinary people of Athens only when they interact with the city’s exceptional characters. This book turns this around, so that we only meet the geniuses of Athens when they interact with ordinary citizens going about their daily business.
Where a chapter of this book is not based on archaeological reconstruction, it is usually a contemporary text repackaged and presented from the perspective of an ordinary Athenian. Where a chapter has thus been rewritten, I have indicated where the original is to be found.
Some of the reconstructions are speculative, although based on the best research now available. Every hour of a day in the life of these Athenians is designed to capture – preferably in the very words of those same Athenians – their experience of living in this extraordinary, dynamic, brilliant and amoral city at the very peak of its greatness.
Today, in the spring of 416, Athens is enjoying an interlude of peace in the devastating Peloponnesian War of 431 to 404 BC. The first round of warfare came to an end with the Peace of Nicias, five years previously. Despite repeated Spartan attacks, which devastated the city’s farms and orchards, Athens came out of that war stronger than ever. In fact, now goaded by Alcibiades, the enfant terrible of Athenian politics, the city is contemplating the audacious invasion and conquest of Sicily.
In this frenetic atmosphere of epoch-changing innovation and political intrigue, where some of the greatest works of western civilization are being forged with the tools of slavery and imperial oppression, ordinary Athenians are trying to get on with their everyday lives in extraordinary circumstances.
This is their story.