History of Athens Chapter 3 PDF

# Chapter 3 - Athens, Greece Greece was originally home to four ancient tribes (Ionians, Achaeans, Aeolians, and Dorians) from which many branches of Greek civilization were derived. While Homer and his nameless successors performed in the households of Ionia and Pythagoras wandered the known world...

# Chapter 3 - Athens, Greece Greece was originally home to four ancient tribes (Ionians, Achaeans, Aeolians, and Dorians) from which many branches of Greek civilization were derived. While Homer and his nameless successors performed in the households of Ionia and Pythagoras wandered the known world looking for answers to life's most complex questions, the Greeks upon the mainland retained a semi-nomadic lifestyle. Families and small, tightly-knit communities of Greeks spent centuries roaming the land and temporarily staying in the towns they founded before moving on. In Athens, many of them eventually found a permanent home. It was here that a group of ancient farmers inhabited the lands of the high hills where they could grow barley, wheat, pomegranates, figs, grapes, and olives. Perched among the low mountaintops and not too far from the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, these farmers flourished as many as 3,000 years before that spot became a metropolis. First only a small village, hardly the most impressive in the Greek lands, Athens persisted, slowly attracting settlers away from the nomadic traditions of the wilds. By the 5th century BCE, Athens was a beautiful city built with hewn stone and filled with religious buildings and objects that served the people's overwhelming need to worship the many deities of their ancestors. Much of its success was due to its proximity to the sea. Nearby, just over 11 kilometers (7 miles) southwest of the budding city, was the busy port city of Piraeus. Humans lived there for at least 2,000 years before Athens was settled; they fished, farmed, and collected salt along the low-lying flats that connected their settlement with the mainland. Athenians would make the trip to gather salt when the flats were dry and exposed, though for much of the year, the port village was physically cut off from them by the risen sea. These were the glory days for Athens when trade between North Africa, Europe, and western Asia was busy and exciting. The markets at Piraeus overflowed with olives, oil, wine, Italian wood, Egyptian grains, honey, silver, pottery, fish, eels, mutton, goat, animal hides, shellfish, and even slaves. Thanks to this once humble port, Athens and other cities along the Mediterranean Sea expanded rapidly, establishing one of the most important and influential cultural networks in the ancient world. For Athens, communications with the outside world were crucial to its own growth and perseverance, particularly since only about one-fifth of Greece's total landmass was suitable for cultivation. Though they did grow their own grains, the barley, wheat, and millet crops were very dependent on ideal weather conditions, and from year to year, their yields fluctuated greatly. In smaller quantities, the early Athenians grew broad beans, chickpeas, and lentils. Other sources of food included cucumbers, apples, pears, pomegranates, onions, garlic, almonds, and walnuts. These were nutritious, but the Athenians needed more grain to sustain a larger population. At Piraeus, they imported exactly what they needed from nearby traders in search of fruit, oil, and fish. With their food sources established, Athens proper and its surrounding region-called Attica-swelled to a population of about 300,000 in the 5th century BCE. An estimated 50,000 of those people were slaves, and about 30,000 of them were adult males with the right to participate in political elections. Despite the sharp lines that were drawn between voters and non-voters, this is the first well-documented example of a well-organized democracy in the world and certainly the first of its kind in Western civilization. It was here that the first principles of government by the people were discussed in their finest details. Before Athenian democracy overtook the rule of the aristocratic archons, however, the people needed the help of its educated, influential reformist citizens. One of the first to condemn the city's oligarchic political model was Solon, born in Attica around 636 BCE. Ironically, Solon was born into a noble family who could trace its lineage back to Codrus, one of the last demi-gods who ruled as King of Athens. Though his family was not particularly wealthy, it was very influential, and in his youth, Solon found himself at the head of an Athenian army whose purpose was to possess the island of Salamis. Salamis lies just a few miles offshore from Piraeus, making it a strategic location for port and merchant developments. A faction of Attica fought against this usurpation, but eventually, the island was granted to Athens by a neutral Spartan envoy who was asked to intervene. Afterward, Solon was made an archon of Athens and the realm, granting him political powers over the entire city and its greater urban area. Eight other men had the same position, and these nine leaders were meant to administer the various facets of Athens based on forthright discussion and agreement amongst themselves. Solon had grand ideas for the people of Athens, but he knew that those ideas would be harshly questioned by the other eight archons. Solon considered himself a man of equality, but the position of archon was held by members of Athens' wealthiest families whom he knew firsthand would reject reform that favored the city's poor. Daringly, Solon made several unprecedented rulings without the counsel of his fellow archons and immediately fled the city to avoid the repercussions. The most controversial new ruling was to erase all public debts. Solon was not only held accountable for this reform in itself but for the fact that his own friends and family had known about it beforehand. Having taken out loans prior to the reforms, these friends knew perfectly well that they would not have to make any repayments. Solon had also legislated that more men of Athens could enter the Assembly, the central governing body of the city in which citizens discussed and voted on issues of the day. It was a means to take the power of government out of the hands of just the aristocrats and share the ownership of the city with its middle class. Having redefined "citizenship" to include any male land-owning person within Attica, Solon's law allowed 400 representative citizens to meet together and administrate the daily laws and issues of the city-state. This assembly was called the boule, and its members were elected by a much larger body of all the realm's adult male citizens. Sadly, Solon was not able to enjoy the wonderful gifts he'd given the middle-class Athenians since he had left Greece altogether and embarked on a ten-year journey that took him all around the Mediterranean. Much like the voyages and adventures of Homer's Odysseus, Solon's travels took him over thousands of miles of ocean and land to meet foreign dignitaries like Pharaoh Amasis II of Egypt. It was the sort of life befitting a poet, which is exactly what Solon preferred to be. Some of his works are included in Plutarch’s Lives: >Some wicked men are rich, some good are poor; >We will not change our virtue for their store: >Virtue's a thing that none can take away, >But money changes owners all the day. Solon's reforms would not last the century, but their premise and ideals far outlasted the man himself. Cleisthenes took up the reins of fair government and democracy once more in 507 BCE, judging that every free man over the age of eighteen living in Attica was a citizen of Athens with the right to representation in the Assembly. Still, only land-owning citizens could serve as those representatives, but it was a fairer system than it had been. This legislation held firm until the Archon Ephialtes convinced his fellow high rulers of the city to further minimize the power of the nobility, granting them only the authority to rule over court cases of murder or sacrilege. This came to pass in 462 BCE when democracy in Athens was firmly established.