Ancient Athens: The Birthplace of Democracy

Few cities in human history have left a legacy as durable as ancient Athens. In the space of about two hundred years — from the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE — Athens gave the Western world its first sustained experiment in citizen self-government, its first great works of drama, history, and philosophy, and most of the basic vocabulary of Western political thought. The buildings of the Acropolis still stand. The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are still performed. The trial of Socrates is still argued about. The very word democracy is a Greek word, meaning “the rule of the people,” and it was coined to describe the Athenian system.

This cluster page walks you through the history, government, society, and culture of ancient Athens, and links out to deep dives on the Acropolis of Athens, the Greek Philosophy cluster, and the Greek Architecture of the city’s most famous buildings.

The Geography of Athens

Athens lies a few miles inland from the port of Piraeus, in a basin of mountains in central Greece. The Acropolis — the steep, flat-topped limestone outcrop that dominates the city — had been a fortress and a place of worship since the Bronze Age. Around it lay the lower city (asty), with the Agora (the marketplace and civic center) to the northwest, the residential districts climbing up the surrounding hills, and the long walls running down to the port of Piraeus.

The surrounding region, Attica, was rocky and not especially fertile, with a few olive groves, some vineyards, and pasture for goats. The Athenians supplemented their own produce with grain imported through Piraeus, much of it from the Black Sea colonies, and used their silver mines at Laurion to mint the owl coins that became the standard currency of the Greek world.

A Brief History of Athens

The earliest known human settlement on the Acropolis dates to the Neolithic period. In the Bronze Age, the Minoan and Mycenaean civilization built a palace on the Acropolis that was later destroyed, perhaps during the Bronze Age collapse. Athens was relatively unimportant in the early Iron Age, but it gradually grew into one of the major city-states of the Greek world.

In the sixth century BCE, the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus and his sons ruled the city as a kind of benign dictatorship, and they began to build the first public buildings, including a temple of Olympian Zeus and a fresh water supply from the surrounding mountains.

In 508 BCE, the aristocrat Cleisthenes introduced a set of reforms that broke the old power of the aristocratic clans and reorganized the citizenry into ten new tribes. The reforms established the basic structure of the democracy that would govern Athens for the next two centuries.

The Athenian Constitution

Athenian democracy was direct, not representative. Every male citizen over the age of eighteen had the right to attend the Ekklesia, the sovereign assembly of the people, which met three or four times a month on the Pnyx hill and decided on war and peace, elected the magistrates, and voted on the laws.

The day-to-day work of government was done by a large number of magistrates chosen by lot from the citizen body. The most important were the ten strategoi (generals), who were elected by the assembly and could be re-elected indefinitely (Pericles held the post for fifteen years). The ten prytaneis served as a kind of executive committee. The boule (council) of 500 citizens prepared the business for the assembly.

Athenian courts were also large juries of 201 to 2,501 citizens, chosen by lot from a panel of 6,000 volunteers. There were no judges in the modern sense; the jurors voted directly on guilt and (in private cases) on the penalty. A vote of the assembly could ostracize — exile — any citizen for ten years.

The system was expensive, slow, and prone to demagoguery, but it gave the Athenian citizen a direct, sustained experience of self-government that no other ancient city came close to matching.

Athens and the Persian Wars

In 490 BCE, the Persian king Darius sent an expedition across the Aegean to punish Athens for its support of the Ionian revolt. The Athenians, supported only by the small city of Plataea, defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon, a turning point in Greek history. Ten years later, the much larger invasion of Xerxes swept down through central Greece. The famous last stand at Thermopylae and the Greek naval victory at Salamis saved Greece. The full story is told in The Persian Wars.

The Periclean Age (461–429 BCE)

The half-century after the Persian Wars was the golden age of Athens. The statesman Pericles led the city for much of this period, presiding over a remarkable flowering of architecture, drama, philosophy, and political power.

Pericles’ greatest legacy is the building program on the Acropolis of Athens, which included the Parthenon (a temple to Athena Parthenos), the Propylaea (the monumental entrance), the Erechtheion (a temple to both Athena and Poseidon), and the Temple of Athena Nike. The sculptors Phidias and his pupils set the standard for Classical Greek art, and the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes made Athenian tragedy and comedy the model for two thousand years of Western drama.

You can read more about the architecture of the city in Greek Architecture: Temples, Theaters, and the Parthenon.

The Peloponnesian War and the Decline of Athens

In 431 BCE, the long-simmering rivalry between Athens and Sparta erupted into the Peloponnesian War. Pericles’ strategy was to abandon the countryside, shelter behind the walls of Athens and Piraeus, and rely on the Athenian navy. A devastating plague in 430 BCE killed a quarter of the Athenian population, including Pericles himself. In 415 BCE, Athens launched the catastrophic Sicilian Expedition. In 405 BCE, the Athenian fleet was destroyed at Aegospotami, and in 404 BCE, the city surrendered.

The democracy was briefly replaced by an oligarchic government (the Thirty Tyrants), but it was restored in 403 BCE, and Athens limped on as a second-rate power for another century before being absorbed into the Macedonian empire of Philip II.

Athenian Society

Athenian society was small, dense, and divided. The free population of Athens in its heyday was perhaps 30,000 adult male citizens, plus their families, plus a larger number of resident foreigners (metics) and a still larger number of slaves. The wealthy lived in substantial houses; the poor lived in tenements; slaves worked the mines, the workshops, and the households. Athenian women were confined to the women’s quarters of the house and rarely appeared in public except for religious festivals. The sexual culture of Athens accepted pederasty as a normal feature of citizen life.

The Athenians loved to talk. They spent their days in the Agora, in the workshops of the potters and the cobblers, in the gymnasia, and in the public spaces where Socrates and his followers used to argue. The orator Demosthenes, the philosopher Aristotle (see Greek Philosophy), the historian Thucydides, and the comic playwright Aristophanes are among the most famous Athenians of the fourth century BCE.

The Legacy of Athens

The Athenian legacy is, quite simply, the Western tradition. Democracy, philosophy, drama, history, the very idea of the citizen — all were Athenian inventions (or, more accurately, Athenian developments of ideas that already existed in some form elsewhere). The Parthenon is still the most influential building in Western architecture. The trial of Socrates is still the paradigm of the conflict between the individual conscience and the democratic state. The plays of Sophocles are still performed on stages around the world. The vocabulary in which we argue about politics, ethics, and the good life is, in large part, the vocabulary the Athenians made.