Athens and around - The Rough Guide to Greece - page 59

The Delian League's wealth enabled office-holders to be properly paid, thereby making
it possible for the poor to play a part in government.
The fatal mistake of the Athenian democracy, however, was allowing itself to be
drawn into the Peloponnesian War (see p.767). Defeated, a demoralized Athens
succumbed to a brief period of oligarchy, though it later recovered sufficiently to
enter a new phase of democracy, the age of Plato . However, in 338 BC, Athens was
again called to defend the Greek city-states, this time against the incursions of Philip
of Macedon . Demosthenes, said to be as powerful an orator as Pericles, spurred the
Athenians to fight, in alliance with the Thebans, at Chaeronea. There they were
routed, in large part by the cavalry commanded by Philip's son, Alexander (later to
become known as Alexander the Great), and Athens fell under the control of the
Macedonian empire.
The city continued to be favoured, particularly by Alexander the Great , a former
pupil of Aristotle, who respected both Athenian culture and its democratic
institutions. Following his death, however, came a more uncertain era, which saw
periods of independence and Macedonian rule, until 146 BC when the Romans (see
box, p.76)swept through southern Greece and it was incorporated into the Roman
province of Macedonia.

1

Christians and Turks
The emergence of Christianity was perhaps the most significant step in Athens' long
decline from the glories of its Classical heyday. Having survived with little change
through years of Roman rule, the city lost its pivotal role in the Roman-Greek world
after the division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western halves, and the
establishment of Byzantium (Constantinople, now Istanbul) as capital of the Eastern
- Byzantine - empire. In 529 AD the city's temples, including the Parthenon, were
reconsecrated as churches.
Athens rarely featured in the chronicles of the Middle Ages, passing through the
hands of various foreign powers before the arrival in 1456 of Sultan Mehmet II , the
Turkish conqueror of Constantinople. Turkish Athens was never much more than a
garrison town, occasionally (and much to the detriment of its Classical buildings) on
the front line of battles with the Venetians and other Western powers. Although the
Acropolis became the home of the Turkish governor and the Parthenon was used as a
mosque, life in the village-like quarters around the Acropolis drifted back to a
semi-rural existence.

THE ATHENIAN GOLDEN AGE
Under the democratic reforms of Pericles, a new and exalted notion of the Athenian citizen
emerged. This was a man who could shoulder political responsibility while also playing a part in
the cultural and religious events of the time. The latter assumed ever-increasing importance.
The city's Panathenaic festival, honouring the goddess Athena, was upgraded along the lines of
the Olympic Games to include drama, music and athletic contests. The next five decades were
to witness a golden age of cultural development during which the great dramatic works of
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes were written. Foreigners
such as Herodotus, considered the inventor of history, and Anaxagoras, the philosopher, were
drawn to live in the city. Thucydides wrote The Peloponnesian War , a pioneering work of
documentation and analysis, while Socrates posed the problems of philosophy that were to
exercise his follower Plato and to shape the discipline to the present day.
But it was the great civic building programme that became the most visible and powerful
symbol of the age. Under the patronage of Pericles, the architects Iktinos, Mnesikles and
Kallikrates, along with the sculptor Fidias, transformed the city. Their buildings included the
Parthenon and Erechtheion on the Acropolis; the Hephaisteion and several stoas (arcades)
around the Agora; a new odeion (theatre) on the South Slope of the Acropolis hill; and, outside
the city, the temples at Soúnio and Ramnous.