Anthony Everitt - The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World’s Greatest Civilization

As a small child I devoured a Victorian storybook that told tales of Greek and Roman mythology. I read every word, except for the sickly sweet poems that were scattered across its pages.

My paternal grandmother noticed my interest in the ancient world and bought me three Penguin Classics, then a new publishing enterprise. She chose E. V. Rieus versions of Homers Iliad and Odyssey and a translation of Platos Symposium. A farmers wife, she was no classicist, and the last of these books came a little early for a prepubertal child, who was mystified by the references to Hellenic homosexuality. But I could not have been given a better sense, smell, flavor, of Greek civilization. Homer and Plato introduced me to a world that was new and ravishing, which, for all the tragedy and the bloodshed, radiated the sunlight and luminous skies of free thought.

For a span of two hundred years in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. , the ancient Athenians pioneered astonishing advances in almost every field of human endeavor. They invented the only real or complete democracy (the word itself is Greek) that has ever existed outside the classical age. Whereas we merely elect representatives to act on our behalf, citizens then met in assembly and took every important decision themselves. (I need to enter a reservation here: the franchise was limited to adult males and so excluded two large social groupswomen and slaves.)

The Athenians believed in reason, and its power to solve the mysteries of the human condition and of nature. They established the concepts and language of philosophy, and raised issues with which todays thinkers still wrestle. They pioneered the arts of tragedy and comedy, architecture and sculpture. They invented history as the accurate narration and interpretation of past events. With their fellow-Greeks they developed mathematics and the natural sciences.

We must beware of exaggeration. The Athenians were part of a general Hellenic advance and borrowed ideas and technologies from their non-Greek neighborsfor example, the Egyptians and the Persiansin 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 todays 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 citys rise and fall I seek to answer this questionor at least to point towards an answer.

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 citys 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 todays 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 iscrammed with adventure and astounding reversals of fortune.

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.