Attica, Greece
The geographical basis of the Athenian state was the peninsula of Attica in Greece. At 2,647 square kilometres this is about the size of a middling English county such as Dorset or Durham, but considerably smaller than Cornwall, the one it most resembles geographically. In the US its equivalent would be Rhode Island. In the early Iron Age, around 900 BC, it may have contained 50,000 people living in a hundred or more scattered communities, most of them coastal. By 600 BC, when the historical record opens, there were probably twice as many people, and all the communities were linked in a political union in which Athens, a hilltop castle with a growing town at its foot, was the agreed centre. This unity was never subsequently questioned.
Sixth-century BC Athens – referring here to the state, not just the town and castle (the ‘high town’ or acropolis) – suffered from the usual problems of the time, many of which stemmed from a tendency for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. For example, a succession of bad harvests could cause the least well-off to lose their farms and be reduced to serfdom, if not slavery. An answer of sorts was found in the person of Pisistratos, an aristocrat who was prepared to rule on behalf of all the people rather than just his own class, and who ran the state fairly well single-handed from 561 to his death in 527. In Greek terms Pisistratos was a tyrant, but the word didn’t have the pejorative connotations that it has now, and the Athenians were sufficiently appreciative of his efforts to allow his sons, Hippias and Hipparchos, to succeed him. Neither of them was up to the job; Hipparchos was assassinated in 514 and Hippias expelled four years later. The question now was what form of government to go for – another, more effective autocrat, or something entirely different?
Famously, the Athenians chose something different, indeed unique. They opted for a democracy. Under the leadership of Cleisthenes, a broad-based populist faction triumphed over both the aristocratic party within the state, and its foreign allies without. Cleisthenes then proceeded to give Athens a constitution that was designed to keep the wealthy in their place, and under which all important decisions, whether political or judicial, would be taken by the people as a whole. The essential elements in the reform were the creation of an assembly, where all males of military age had the right to vote; an executive council 500 strong, with representatives from every community in Attica; and the use of juries that had a minimum of several hundred members, i.e. were too big to bribe. The really cunning thing was that the constituencies that sent representatives to the council were each made up of communities from three separate parts of Attica: one in or near Athens, one on the coast and one inland. That way, the aristocracy, whose influence was usually based on land holdings limited to one sector, couldn’t get control of all the individual constituencies and so were unable to dominate the executive.
At the time of Cleisthenes’ reforms, in 507–505 BC, Attica probably had around 120,000 inhabitants and Athens town around 7,500. Such figures may seem puny to us but by contemporary standards they most certainly were not. Athens was among the largest of Greek states, and Athens town was easily the biggest place in the entire peninsula. It was probably this exceptional size that led the Persians to misjudge the situation so badly when they launched an expedition against central Greece in 490 BC. The Persians had had no difficulty in conquering the Greek communities on the east side of the Aegean: these were all small, with no more than a few thousand citizens apiece, and the Persians were able to pick them off one by one. They planned to do exactly the same on the west side, where they assumed Greek political structures were much the same. At first it looked as if this was a correct assessment. A Persian task force crossed the Aegean, sailed up the channel between Attica and Euboea and, after the briefest of sieges, took its first objective, the Euboean town of Eretria. Following this successful operation the Persians moved to Attica, disembarking on the plain of Marathon, where they reckoned their cavalry could operate to best effect. The Athenians had no cavalry, but they made a maximum effort as regards infantry and managed to field a force of 9,000 hoplites, armoured spearmen trained to fight in close order. This proved sufficient to rout the Persian army, which was certainly no larger and may have been considerably smaller, than the Athenian. The Battle of Marathon immediately assumed mythic status as a victory of democracy over despotism, the free over the servile, David over Goliath, etc., all of which was near enough true but not much help as regards the longer-term struggle to which both sides, Greek and Persian, were now committed.
The Persian response to Marathon was predictable: if they couldn’t support a big enough army by sea then they would have to send one that was big enough by land. It took them ten years to make their preparations, but when King Xerxes was finally ready the army he led across the Hellespont was of crushing size, far bigger than anything seen in Europe before. It was accompanied by a correspondingly large fleet. The Athenians, meanwhile, had made an unexpected decision. Normally when people have had a success they go for more of the same, which in the Athenian case would have meant doubling up on their army. Instead, prompted by the politician and general Themistocles, Athens decided to rely on a Big Navy policy. Themistocles persuaded the assembled Athenians that Sparta was always going to be the number-one land power in Greece, and that if Athens was to be the number one at anything it would have to be at sea. By the time Xerxes entered Greece, in 480 BC, the Athenians had acted on this assessment with such vigour that they had 200 warships at their disposal, as many as all the other states of Greece put together. The first trial of the new navy was a disappointment, a tactical draw that amounted to a strategic defeat. Attica had to be abandoned, and the ships used to ferry the people to the safety of the Peloponnese. The inevitable result was that Athens was ransacked by Xerxes’ soldiery, its homes and temples burned. The second sea battle, at Salamis, fully made up for this setback, however: it was a decisive Greek victory that put an immediate stop to Xerxes’ advance. The next year the Spartans won a matching victory on land, and such Persians as survived fled back to Asia.
As the Spartans had little interest in the world beyond Greece, it was left to the Athenians to follow up these victories. They quickly destroyed what was left of the Persian navy in the Aegean and liberated the Greek communities along its northern and eastern coasts. These communities were then recruited into a league dedicated to driving home the Greek advantage and attacking the Persians wherever they looked vulnerable, most notably Cyprus (already a predominantly Greek island) and Egypt (always ready to revolt against Persian rule). But both these targets proved tougher than expected. All the league’s expeditions failed, many with heavy losses, and eventually Athens had to call it a day. In theory this meant that the league could cut back on its military outlay and its individual members reduce their commitments, but the Athenians didn’t see it that way. Contributions continued to be collected at the same level, no one was allowed to opt out, and to underline this new interpretation of the rules, the league treasury, originally situated on the central Aegean island of Delos, was transferred to Athens in 454 BC. What had been billed as a pan-Hellenic coalition had turned out to be an Athenian empire.
Athens’ political success transformed the town of Athens itself. Only three years after Salamis, the Athenian statesman Aristides advised his fellow citizens to leave their farms and live in the city. The demands of empire meant that there would be jobs for all. Many would be in the navy, which had its base at PIRAEUS, and others entailed postings overseas, but the lion’s share would have been in Athens itself. Just to perform its constitutional functions the city needed a minimum of 6,000 citizens, and with the assembly and the law courts with juries in almost continuous session, it needed them to be there all the time. The influx, which probably quadrupled the city’s population, meant extra expenditure, which would have sparked off further growth: the new residents had to be housed, and a new city wall constructed to defend them. On top of this – quite literally – the ceremonial buildings on the hilltop (the acropolis or ‘high town’), were now rebuilt in marble, a material rarely used on this scale before. The money for all this came from the league budget, something that caused the Athenians no qualms at all: they fully believed that what was good for Athens was good for its allies, indeed for Greeks everywhere.
Much money was also spent in Piraeus, and on the Long Walls that connected city and port. In fact the situation of Athens in its imperial heyday can only be properly understood if this entry is read in conjunction with the entry for Piraeus. Both places grew as the empire grew, and owed their prosperity to the same maritime strategy, and to the extent the necessary summary of Athenian naval history is given there and not here, it’s simply to avoid duplication.
A ballpark figure for the population of Athens around this time – the middle of the fifth century BC, when everything was going Athens’ way – would be somewhere around 35,000. This was an unprecedented number of people for a Greek town and it provided the basis for an upsurge in the arts and sciences that made Athens the intellectual capital of the peninsula. It was to the Athenians that Herodotus chose to read his History, the first work to deserve that title; it was in the Theatre of Dionysus at the foot of the acropolis that Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides presented the tragedies that marked the beginning of western drama. Other Greek communities had their philosophers, but none could rival the reputations of Socrates and Plato, nor could they boast sculptors the equal of Phidias or architects who could match the peerless design of the Parthenon. For the 200 years of the classical period, the fifth and fourth centuries BC, nearly everyone who was of importance in Greek cultural history was an Athenian by birth or adoption.
In the closing years of the fifth century BC, Athens overreached itself militarily and its empire was dismantled by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. Both the state and the city of Athens survived this debacle surprisingly well. The Athenians liked the way of life they had assumed in the fifth century, and although the treasury was depleted they proved able to maintain the apparatus of democracy and the festivals and monuments of the city through the fourth century BC. No new glories were added, but just as the Viennese kept up a metropolitan lifestyle after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Athenians long retained the social structure of their imperial era. The citizen body certainly contracted – a census in 312/309 BC returned a figure of 21,000, as opposed to the 30,000 recorded two centuries earlier – but the number of metics (resident foreigners), given as 10,000, made up the difference.
At this point – the end of the fourth century BC – immigration ceased and there are clear signs of decline in every sphere. The city had to submit to the authority of the kings of Macedon, and its subsequent debates were limited to local affairs. RHODES replaced Piraeus as the centre of the Aegean trading network; ALEXANDRIA replaced Athens as the intellectual capital of Hellenism. The population of Attica, as of all Greece, began to seep away to the new lands opened up by Alexander the Great. Athens became a sort of university town, pampered first by Hellenistic benefactors (most notably King Attalus II of PERGAMUM), then by Roman emperors (most notably Hadrian). Indeed, its monuments had never looked better than they did in Hadrian’s reign (AD 117–38), and so long as imperial handouts were available, Athens continued in the appearance of prosperity. Underneath this veneer, though, there must have been a steady shrinkage in local resources. Just how low these had fallen became obvious when the town was sacked by the Germanic Heruls in AD 267. A wall built to protect the remaining population enclosed a mere twenty-five hectares, room for no more than a few thousand people. The nadir came with a second sack, by the Slavs at the end of the sixth century AD, after which only the Acropolis seems to have been defended. The story of the city had come full circle. Michael Akominatos, a Byzantine prelate appointed Bishop of Athens in the twelfth century, described it as a godforsaken hole and its inhabitants as uncivilized.
For a town that enjoyed such high status throughout antiquity, Athens has surprisingly few monuments. However, high quality more than makes up for the lack of quantity, the shining example of this being the Parthenon, the Temple of Athena that forms the centrepiece of the constructions on the acropolis. Built to impress at a time when Athens aspired to be ‘an education to Greece’, its elegance and opulence ensured that it did so. Now it has become the icon of Hellenism and, in a semi-mystical way, the ultimate statement of classical Greek values. This type of thinking can easily get out of hand, but in this instance there is a real jewel in the heart of the hyperbole.
Originally the acropolis was a simple stronghold, a role it had played since the Bronze Age when there was neither a town at its foot nor an Athenian state. With the political unification of Attica, traditionally ascribed to Theseus, the acropolis became the centre of Athens town, the capitol of the capital, so to speak. And, as Athens town prospered, the existing hilltop shrine to the goddess Athena began to seem unnecessarily humble. Rebuilding began under Pisistratos in the mid sixth century BC, but in the mood of optimism that followed the victory of Marathon, the Pisistratid constructions were swept away as being not grand enough. The top of the hill was levelled, the whole of it declared a ceremonial area, and work begun on a big new temple to Athena the Virgin (Athena Parthenos). This was less than half built when Athens, both town and citadel, fell to the Persians in 480 BC. Smarting from their earlier defeat the Persians did as much damage as they could, and when the Athenians recovered the city the next year they were so dismayed by what they found that they left the acropolis bare for the next thirty years. Then they began work again, this time with the funds of a sizeable maritime empire at their disposal. The three main buildings that form the present-day acropolis complex – the Parthenon, the Erechtheion (the temple of the city’s founding father, Erechtheus) and the Propylaia (the monumental gateway) – were all put up in the period 447–406 BC, before the empire fell and the money stopped. The Parthenon is, of course, the main element, although some classical opinion favoured the Propylaia as the subtler piece of architecture. The Erechtheion, small and in every sense of the word peculiar, is the one with the caryatids (columns in the shape of girls).
In the lower town the main focus of interest is the agora, the open space that served the Athenians as an informal meeting place, and around which were sited the law courts and the buildings of the political executive. It is not, however, where the official assembly of the citizens was held: for this there was a separate open-air site on the Pnyx hill at the western edge of town. The theatre in which the Athenian playwrights presented their works was at the foot of the acropolis where, in the Greek manner, it could make use of the rising ground for its auditorium.
The Romans added significantly to Athens’ amenities. Augustus donated a ‘Roman agora’ to the city (although this was only a monumentalization of an existing commercial market); his right-hand man Agrippa followed up with a huge, roofed odeon on the south side of the original agora. These were considerable works, but they were overshadowed by the constructions of the philhellene emperor Hadrian and his governor of Asia, Herodes Atticus, who was an Athenian by birth. Herodes Atticus built an unroofed odeon to the west of the Theatre of Dionysus, and turned the earth-banked stadium (athletics track) just outside the city into a gleaming structure of solid marble. Hadrian built a public library just to the north of Augustus’ marketplace and completed the Olympieion, a massive temple in the south-east corner of the city that had been started 650 years earlier but never finished. He also laid out a new residential quarter north-east of the Olympieion.
Hadrian’s new suburb compensated for the loss of the south-west quarter of the city that had been cut off since a wall had been built to simplify the city’s defence line in the Hellenistic period, around 290 BC. When the empire’s time of troubles began in the mid third century AD and the emperor Valens ordered the city’s defences refurbished, the circuit was extended to include this addition, returning the intramural area to its original size. The line proved too long for the reduced population of Athens to defend. In AD 267 the Heruls, a tribe of Germans who had penetrated the Danube defence line, broke in and put the city to the sack. The late Roman wall built in the aftermath of this disaster, the last significant work of antiquity, is a sad thing, cobbled together from half-destroyed buildings and fallen columns, defending only a tiny area at the foot of the acropolis.
We don’t have any direct record of the population of Athens town, but we do have two figures for the number of Athenian citizens – freeborn males of military age. The earlier, 30,000, is given by Herodotus, writing in the mid fifth century BC. It probably derives from a census taken by Cleisthenes at the end of the sixth century BC. Although there is no mention of Cleisthenes conducting a population survey, it is inconceivable that he could have set up his system of proportional representation on the council without finding out how many citizens there were and where they lived. As Athens town supplied twenty-eight of the council’s 500 members (5.6 per cent), we can calculate that it had the same proportion of the state’s citizens, which suggests that in his day Athens town had a population of 30,000 × 0.056 = 1,680 citizens, and, assuming an average family size of four, a total population of 6,720. This looks reasonable for a town whose great days were yet to come. Figures for the city in its heyday are more contentious. An absolute upper limit is provided by Thucydides’ statement that until the Peloponnesian War forced them to retreat to the city, most Athenians lived in the countryside. Subtracting a modest proportion for the residents of Piraeus, this suggests that at the very most 10,000 of Athens’ 30,000 citizens lived in Athens town, giving a theoretical ceiling of around 50,000 inhabitants in 431 BC. The preferred figure of 35,000 is based on Xenophon’s remark that Athens had 10,000 houses and Dikaiarchos’ statement that these were ‘mostly mean, few [being] commodious’. Using a low multiplier of 3.5 that squares with this observation yields our ballpark 35,000. John Travlos rejects Xenophon’s statement in favour of a calculation of his own based on a built-up area of 120 hectares, fifty (rather grand) houses per hectare and a very grand multiplier of 6: 6,000 houses × 6 = 36,000, a different path to the same result. In 404 BC the aristocratic oligarchy installed by the Spartans invited 3,000 citizens to take part in their government, while expelling 5,000 others from the city. This suggests a citizen population just before the expulsion of around 8,000 × 3.5 = 28,000, to which we can add something of the order of 10,000 non-citizens (metics and their dependants, and slaves), making 38,000. A final pointer to a figure in this general area is the 1861 census, which recorded a total of 42,725 Athenians living in an area of 260 hectares. This could be taken to indicate a population in the region of 42,725 × 215/260 = 35,330 for the city in the fifth century BC when the walled area was 215 hectares.
Until the end of the fourth century BC, figures for Athens town probably held fairly steady. The second census we know of, taken by Demetrius of Phaleron during the 117th Olympiad (312–309 BC) shows a decline in the citizen body (to 21,000), balanced by the addition of 10,000 metics (there would have been almost none in Cleisthenes’ day). Metics probably had fewer dependants than did citizens, but a disproportionately large number of them were urban, so the two effects probably cancel out. After 300 BC the course was certainly downhill. By that time and thereafter, there simply can’t have been room for a population of more than a few thousand within the late Roman wall.
The Turkish conquest in 1456 ushered in a new phase of growth, but numbers were still short of 10,000 in the year 1500.