Athens

James H. S. McGregor

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674369467
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Revered as the birthplace of Western thought and democracy, Athens is much more than an open-air museum filled with crumbling monuments to ancient glory. Athens takes readers on a journey from the classical city-state to today's contemporary capital, revealing a world-famous metropolis that has been resurrected and redefined time and again.Although the Acropolis remains the city's anchor, Athens' vibrant culture extends far beyond the Greek city's antique boundaries. James H. S. McGregor points out how the cityscape preserves signs of the many actors who have crossed its historical stage. Alexander the Great incorporated Athens into his empire, as did the Romans. Byzantine Christians repurposed Greek temples, the Parthenon included, into churches. From the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the city's language changed from French to Spanish to Italian, as Crusaders and adventurers from different parts of Western Europe took turns sacking and administering the city. An Islamic Athens took root following the Ottoman conquest of 1456 and remained in place for nearly four hundred years, until Greek patriots finally won independence in a blood-drenched revolution.Since then, Athenians have endured many hardships, from Nazi occupation and military coups to famine and economic crisis. Yet, as McGregor shows, the history of Athens is closer to a heroic epic than a Greek tragedy. Richly supplemented with maps and illustrations, Athens paints a portrait of one of the world's great cities, designed for travelers as well as armchair students of urban history.

1

On the Rock

Like much of the coastal Mediterranean, Athens is, at heart, recycled ocean floor. The city’s raw materials slowly filtered through and settled beneath the shallow waters of an ancient pre-Mediterranean sea named Tethys. Sand, broken down from continental rock, and mud from flatlands and marshes surged with floodwaters or drifted offshore on the wind. In those same shallow waters, tiny sea creatures with calcium-rich shells lived, bred, and died. Their soft bodies decomposed, but their shells remained, and over unimaginable generations these shells consolidated and petrified to produce layers of limestone hundreds of feet thick.

Tethys happened to occupy a patch of shrinking real estate at the intersection of continents. The tectonic plate that carries Africa has, for millions of years, narrowed the gap between itself and the plates that support Europe and Asia. Along the western edge of the Italian peninsula, where the African plate is sliding under the European plate, its movement has created a line of volcanoes. Further east in the Balkans, these plates appear to have butted against each other rather than slipping one under the other; here there are no volcanoes, but the region has a long history of earthquakes. In Greece the steady thrust of the African plate has both lifted and compacted the former sea bottom. It has pushed petrified mud and shell above water level and simultaneously squeezed it into a series of parallel ridges. These ridges pile up along the leading edge of the plate; their direction, northwest to southeast, is perpendicular to the northeast thrust of the African continental mass.

These two primitive geological events—the sea floor deposits in Tethys and the ramming action of the African plate—pared down by the long-term effects of erosion, more or less account for the Greek landmass. Within that mass, Attica, the subregion to which Athens belongs, is a fairly good small-scale representation of the national geological dynamic. Rather than a mountain ridge that runs northwest to southeast, Attica is a peninsula with the same orientation—the geological forces that pushed up other regions failed to lift Attica far above the waterline. And while its few mountains are more shattered and eroded than others farther north, they are equally effective in blocking the peninsula from its neighbors. In essence, Greece is fragmented by mountains and especially by mountain ridges, and that fragmentation has been a fundamental political and cultural fact throughout much of the country’s history.

Athens is close to the sea but not on it. It sits near the banks of the Ilissos River, but that river, like the majority of Greece’s rivers, is seasonally dry. Athens’s greatest resource is the Attic plain. From time to time during the prehistoric era, Athens and the Attic plain were joined economically and politically. Whenever that happened, Athens flourished. In other periods, the links were broken and the city’s power, wealth, and influence collapsed. The importance of this intermittent interdependency between Athens and Attica rests on the nature of the particular historical period during which Greek life began.

The earliest known settlement in Athens dates from the Neolithic period. That period began in Greece in about 6500 BCE. Before that time, Greece’s few occupants were foragers; hunting animals and gathering wild plants, fruits, and nuts were the basis for their survival. More than eight thousand years ago, settlers began to arrive in Greece from the coast of Anatolia. These migrants were probably few in number, but they brought with them the constituent parts of what prehistorians have recently begun to call the “Neolithic package.” This was an interrelated suite of technologies and forms of social life that had been developed thousands of years earlier in various parts of the Levant. It included cultivation of cereal grains, legumes, fruits, nuts, and other crops. This “package” also incorporated domesticated sheep and goats, as well as a few larger animals like cattle and oxen. Along with the animals and vegetable crops, these settlers brought a few other novelties: they were skilled in making pottery, and they were accustomed to living in villages and towns.

Historians have long argued about the number of settlers who came to Greece in this era. Contemporary prehistorians tend to think that their numbers were quite small, but they also believe that, for a variety of reasons, their impact far outweighed their size. Interaction between the newly arrived settlers and the indigenous people was likely slight. Hunter-gatherers needed to be mobile, and they tended to follow their prey from one seasonal camp to another. These new arrivals were looking for agricultural land, which they were most likely to find in low-lying river valleys and along the coast. There was probably little immediate competition between the two groups for land or resources.

Over time, however, significant differences developed between the two groups, and those differences always worked to the advantage of the settlers. Hunter-gatherer populations were limited by the availability of prey; since they had no control over the productivity of the herds, grasses, and wild fruits that they depended on, their populations probably remained small and close to the upper limit of what their range could sustain. By contrast, the Neolithic people living in the valleys and along the coast grew their own food, and they could produce more by intensifying cultivation and expanding the land they farmed, so they were able to sustain bigger communities. When migrants married with hunter-gatherers, the farmers easily integrated them into their growing community, while the hunter-gatherer community was less able to reciprocate. Over a few generations, the many descendants of these few immigrants would form a much larger community than the descendants of the foragers. Farmers would control the most productive land, and the shrinking bands of hunter-gatherers would be pushed to the edges of their old domains, where resources were scarcest.

At a certain point, the farming community would begin to exceed the limits of its resources. Then a portion of it would break off and travel to new lands. Migrants from Greece moved northwestward into the valley of the Danube River, near its junction with the Black Sea. There they established a productive agricultural society that flourished in the fifth millennium BCE. Among historians, this community has been the focus of a great deal of interest and controversy. It appears to have been a peaceful, egalitarian society sensitive to its environment and one in which women were well-regarded if not in fact dominant. The connections between the Danube valley communities and the first agricultural communities in Greece suggest that those two cultures might have shared important characteristics. The earliest Greek communities might also have been relatively nonviolent, egalitarian ones in which women had highly valued social roles. These societies are also assumed to have worshipped a pantheon of deities with similar characteristics. Typically, their religion is associated with a mother goddess linked to the earth and the reproductive cycles of both the ecological and the human communities.

An artifact representing this culture was found near the slopes of the Acropolis and dated to the fifth millennium BCE. Discovered in 1938, the figurine (pictured on page 67 of Hurwit, referred to in the Further Reading list at the end of this book)—like many others collected in areas all around the borders of the Mediterranean—is clearly female, with corpulent thighs, buttocks, and belly. Figurines of this kind are typically labeled as images of a goddess; their characteristic emphases and exaggerations are taken to be evidence of a culture’s respect for the reproductive power of women and the fundamental role fecundity played in early Neolithic societies. Though not directly related to agriculture, the figure’s dimensions suggest a woman who has been well nourished on the fat of the land. The emphasis on sexual characteristics suggests that her reproductive capacity, like that of the fields and flocks that have nourished her, is of primary importance to her society.

The worship of the goddess—if that is what we are seeing in these figurines or, more generally, in the archaeological remains of early Neolithic societies in the Eastern Mediterranean—eventually came to an end. The societies we know historically, from a written record that began in the early third millennium BCE, are not matriarchal. In Greek history, art, and literature, which began much later, we see little reflection of the worldview or the social structure of the earliest Neolithic period. The historical societies of Greece and other cultures of the ancient Mediterranean were male-dominated ones in which warriors held power and commanded prestige, while women and those who worked the soil were socially inferior. These societies worshipped a pantheon of sky or mountain gods who had, according to their own mythologies, achieved power and dominion over earlier generations of earth gods.

What happened to change this picture so dramatically? What happened to the goddess and the cultures that reflected her earthbound values? How did patriarchal, warrior societies come to be dominant not just in Attica but throughout the region? These questions are particularly puzzling because the patterns of Neolithic life remained unchanged between the ninth and third millennia BCE, the period when these sweeping social changes would have taken place. Societies became more diversified, but they remained agricultural. The crops and many farming techniques remained constant, and all societies in the region continued to depend on agriculture for their survival. Still, early Neolithic mythology and social structure appear to have died out, to be replaced by something distinctly different.

In the nineteenth century, dramatic changes of this kind were always linked to one common cause: migration. The peace-loving, matriarchal farmers of the Danube valley appear to have been replaced by nomadic herders from the steppes of southern Russia sometime in the mid-fourth millennium BCE. Marija Gimbutas, a leading theorist of matriarchy in the twentieth century, argued that these nomads brought with them an entirely new kind of culture. Based on the mobility of the horse, this new culture substituted violence, masculine dominance, and a pantheon of sky gods for the older culture of the indigenous agriculturalists. In other words, an invading minority imposed its will and its value system on an agricultural majority. This also suggests that the warrior class imposed its worldview and its gods on an agricultural class at least ten times its size. It suggests that coercion rather than persuasion was the glue that held primitive societies together. There is evidence to support the notion that horse-riding invaders from the Russian steppes entered the Danube territories at the end of this most vital period. There is no evidence, however, to tell us whether these newcomers took advantage of existing political instability in a society collapsing under its own weight or whether they created the disaster themselves.

Ian Hodder, a leading prehistorian, has suggested that the transformation of Neolithic societies from their earliest egalitarian, woman-centered formations to those where men dominated may not have been the result of hostile invaders but part of the dynamic of agricultural development. When agricultural communities or colonies were small and had abundant resources available to them, it was the scarcity of labor that limited their ability to exploit the resources at their disposal. In that era, anything that increased the labor pool was precious. The reproductive capacity of women was sacred, because it was the only pathway toward increasing this resource. When a population reached the maximum that its agricultural base could sustain, the limiting factor changed from labor to land. Even in matriarchal societies, it seems to have been the case that men typically controlled land and trade while women controlled the household and the family. When land became a scarce resource, the power of the men who controlled it grew dramatically. Hodder’s argument explains a great deal. The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy would not have been the result of invasion and the violent imposition of an alien value system on peasants too weak to resist; instead, it would have been the story of a crisis in faith brought on by changes in the most fundamental part of the social order, its agricultural base.

The Attic plain undoubtedly experienced a similar transformation from the cult of fecundity and fertility represented by the Acropolis figurine to something much more familiar from history and mythology. We can safely discount the notion that significant cultural change necessarily means invasion and the violent imposition of new values. We can also continue to appreciate the intimate connection between whatever social formation governed among the elite powers and the agricultural base that sustained them. Attica was an agrarian region, and Athens was the prime beneficiary of its productivity. The relationship between the city and its hinterland was not a coercive or exploitative one, but one that continued to reflect shared values and a universally recognized interdependency.

In Greek myth the linkage of multiple villages and power centers is called synoikismos, and its accomplishment in Attica is attributed to the mythical King Theseus. Ancient historians and Greek mythmakers both thought of this unification as a onetime event, but archaeology suggests that through its earliest history Athens was periodically united and intermittently severed from the surrounding region. In the modern world, a city is a largely independent political structure defined by its dense population and its close-knit fabric of houses and businesses. Modern Athens, which has spilled out of its historical confines and flowed over most of the Attic plain, is a prime example of a modern city.

In contrast to this modern view, writers from Homer through the time of Aristotle recognized a close relationship between the densely packed city and the countryside that surrounded it. Aristotle thought that all social life depended on the family and that the family was fundamentally a labor cooperative focused on farming. Villages were created by interdependent families, and urban centers, which Aristotle saw as the optimal environment for human beings, were one notch higher in organization and development. In Aristotle’s mind, as in the minds of most ancient Athenians, the city never lost its links with the productive agricultural land that surrounded it. Powerful Athenians may have enjoyed a particularly sophisticated lifestyle that was well beyond the reach of rural folk, but the city remained rooted in the villages and dependent upon them for survival—at their most successful, Athens and Attica were partners. What the plains of Attica produced was consumed by the city of Athens. The pottery, scythes, and plows that Athenian craftsmen made were essential to cultivating the fields and bringing in the harvest. The gods that the city worshipped ensured the welfare of the entire community. Synoikismos in this sense meant the political recognition of the interdependence of city and region.

The Acropolis as seen from the country from the southeast, 1869. William James Stillman, photographer. (Fine Arts Library, Harvard University)

Indeed, despite the brilliance of its intellectual and artistic life, life in ancient Attica was organized around agriculture. Eight or nine out of every ten men and women were directly involved in agriculture, so land was the most important source of wealth: taxes on wealthy landowners were the key to the city’s military power as well as its religious and social culture. Athens was a major commercial center, and Attica had some mineral resources, especially silver. The bulk of its trade, however, like ancient trade in general, was in agricultural products. Olive oil, wine, and wool were probably Attica’s biggest commodities. In key eras of its commercial success and influence, Athens also traded in pottery. Even this precious and highly sought good retained its links to practical life and, especially, to agriculture.

A striking example of the pervasive influence of agriculture even in this luxury market comes from Athens’s Panathenaic games. Victors in those games received as prizes urns handcrafted in Athens and painted by skilled artisans. While we might assume that the urns were sufficient trophies of success, it turns out that they were awarded in quantity rather than one to a victor, and arrived filled with olive oil from the sacred grove of the Athenians. The urns were an enduring symbol of the victor’s triumph, but the forty quarts of select oil that each urn contained was a precious commodity. The city’s wealth, like its food, was grown almost entirely in Attica by farmers closely linked to Athens. Without this unusually rich agricultural surround, Athens could not have been the political and commercial powerhouse that it became.

The region’s geology of rock, not just its soil, also played a fundamental part in shaping the city. For twenty-five centuries, the most prominent landmark in Athens has been an architectural monument elevated on a natural pedestal. Long before the Parthenon was built on top of it, the Acropolis outcrop was this city’s most prominent feature and the core of repeated settlements. It is only one among a cluster of linked hills that have played significant parts in Athenian history. The Acropolis outcrop is not even the biggest hill in the immediate vicinity; that distinction belongs to Lykabettos, which has never played much of a role in civic life. Structurally, all of the hills of Athens, including the largest, are shattered remnants of one eroded limestone ridge, a bit of Tethys pushed up by the African plate and eroded by millions of years of storm and wind. And it is limestone that the Acropolis has relied on to power its long and significant civic history. The particular limestone of the Acropolis is a light blue-gray, and it is relatively hard, which has slowed its erosion and altogether prevented the wearing away of softer rock layers beneath it. This durable elevated platform has served the city in two widely recognized ways over its long history. During the thirteenth century BCE, the limestone mesa was home to a leading, if not ruling, family. Near the end of the era when the Greek city-state Mycenae dominated the Greek peninsula and much of the Eastern Mediterranean, sometime around 1250 BCE, their palatial residence was shielded by a massive wall.

Mount Lykabettos rises high above the surrounding blocks.

From the mid-eighth century until the end of the classical era, the Acropolis was home to the city gods and the shrines that sheltered them. In that era, the ability of Athens to unify and lead the region depended on the religious authority of those shrines. In the centuries of postclassical occupation, the Acropolis reverted to its earliest role. Later, in the Middle Ages, it became a castle that could be cut off from the town below to shelter occupying powers. Beginning in the mid-fift...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. On the Rock
• 2. The Acropolis in the Fifth Century
• 3. The Athenian Agora
• 4. On the Perimeter
• 5. Hellenistic and Roman Athens
• 6. Late Antique and Medieval Athens
• 7. The War for Independence and the Creation of a National Capital
• 8. Modern Athens
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Index