Athens through the ages

Athens is named for the goddess Athena, though modern scholars generally agree the goddess took her name from the city rather than the reverse. During the first millennium BC Athens brought the other towns of Attica under its rule, a process called synoikismos — the bringing together into one home — which created the largest and wealthiest state on the Greek mainland and, with it, a large class of people the nobility excluded from political life. Social unrest was widespread by the seventh century BC. The Areopagus appointed Draco to draft a strict new code of law, and when that failed gave Solon a mandate for a new constitution in 594 BC. Solon forbade the enslavement of Athenian citizens for debt, broke up large landed estates, freed up trade, and divided the citizens into four classes by wealth and capacity for military service; the poorest, the Thetai, who were the majority, could vote in the Assembly for the first time, though only the upper classes could hold office.

The settlement did not end the class conflict, and after twenty years the popular party under Peisistratos seized power. He kept Solon's constitution while ensuring that his family held every office of state. His sons ruled less adeptly: Hipparchus was assassinated in 514 BC in a private dispute, and Hippias, having turned to open dictatorship, was overthrown in 510 BC. Cleisthenes then replaced the four traditional tribes with ten new ones that had no class basis and functioned as electorates, each sending fifty members to the Boule that governed day to day. The Assembly was open to all citizens and served as both legislature and supreme court, most offices were filled by lot, and the ten generals were elected. With a few brief interruptions the system held for 170 years.

In 499 BC Athens sent a small force to support the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor against Persian rule, an intervention that contributed to two Persian invasions of the mainland. The first landed at Marathon in 490 BC, where an Athenian army under Miltiades repelled it. Before the second, Themistocles persuaded the assembly to spend the revenues of newly discovered silver at Laurion on warships rather than distribute them to citizens. When Xerxes invaded in 480 BC the population was evacuated to Troezen in the Peloponnese; the Persians took the deserted city and burned the buildings on the Acropolis. Later that year the Athenian-led fleet caught the Persians in the narrows off Salamis and inflicted heavy losses, and in 479 BC the army Xerxes had left behind was beaten at Plataea.

Out of the war came the Delian League, formed to carry the fight on against Persia and soon the basis of Athenian power across the Aegean. Pericles used the tribute paid by the League's members to build the Parthenon and the other great monuments of the classical city, which he called "the school of Hellas". The dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides and the sculptor Phidias all lived in Athens in the golden age that ran from the end of the Persian Wars to the Macedonian conquest, and the political satire of the comic poets carried real weight with public opinion.

Resentment at Athenian hegemony brought on the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, which set Athens and its increasingly rebellious overseas empire against a coalition of land powers led by Sparta. Sparta held the land and Athens the sea until the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, and the war ended in defeat after the Battle of Aegospotami broke Athenian naval supremacy. The loss was blamed on democratic politicians and brought the Spartan-backed rule of the Thirty Tyrants, until Thrasybulus restored the democracy in 403 BC and declared an amnesty. Athens fought Sparta again in the indecisive Corinthian War and built a Second Athenian League, but at Chaeronea in 338 BC Philip II defeated an alliance including Athens and Thebes, forced them into a confederation and effectively limited Athenian independence.

Alexander's conquests made the traditional city-state obsolete. Athens stayed wealthy and culturally brilliant but was no longer a leading power, and after Alexander's death in 323 BC it became a piece in other men's wars: Cassander took the Piraeus, leaving the city without a source of supplies, and secured Athens itself in 316 BC. Rome then absorbed the whole peninsula. Athens allied with Rome in the Second Macedonian War, of which Livy observed that "words are the only weapons that the Athenians have left", and when the Achaean League was defeated and dissolved in 146 BC Greece was divided into the Roman provinces of Macedonia and Achaea.

During the First Mithridatic War Athens was held by Aristion, a tyrant installed by Mithridates VI, and in 88–85 BC the Roman general Sulla levelled most of its fortifications and homes after besieging the city and the Piraeus. Rome then granted Athens the status of a free city on account of its widely admired schools, and Hadrian put up a large number of civic buildings there. The city was sacked in 267 AD and all its public buildings burned, after which the quarter north of the Acropolis was hastily refortified.

From the early fourth century the eastern empire was governed from Constantinople, and many of Athens's works of art were taken away to adorn the new imperial city. As the empire became Christian, monuments including the Parthenon and the Erechtheion were converted into churches and Athens became a provincial town, though it remained a centre of Neoplatonist learning whose pupils included Basil of Caesarea and the emperor Julian. The sack by the Heruli in 267 and by the Visigoths under Alaric I in 396 dealt heavy blows to its fabric, and Athens was thereafter confined to a small fortified area covering a fraction of the ancient city. Justinian I banned the teaching of philosophy by pagans in 529, generally taken to mark the end of the ancient history of Athens.

Archaeology shows rapid, sustained growth from the eleventh century to the end of the twelfth: the agora, deserted since late antiquity, was built over, the town became an important producer of soaps and dyes, and Venetian and other traders working the Aegean ports were drawn in. That prosperity ended with the Fourth Crusade's conquest in 1204, after which Latins ruled for two and a half centuries. Under the Burgundian De la Roche dukes a bell tower known as the Frankish Tower was added to the Parthenon and the Acropolis was fortified, though Thebes replaced Athens as the ducal capital. The Catalan Company took the city in 1311 and held it until 1388; the Florentine Nerio I Acciajuoli then took it, and his descendants ruled until the Ottoman conquest of 1458.

Athens was captured in 1458 by Mehmed II in person, who was struck by its ancient monuments and issued a firman forbidding their looting or destruction on pain of death; the Parthenon was converted into the city's main mosque. Under Ottoman rule Athens was stripped of importance and its population fell sharply, leaving what one historian has called a "small country town". Gunpowder was stored in the Parthenon and the Propylaea; lightning destroyed the Propylaea in 1640, and on 26 September 1687, during the Morean War, a shot from Francesco Morosini's besieging Venetians blew up the magazine in the Parthenon and left the building largely as it now appears. The Venetians held Athens for six months, both they and the Ottomans looting the temple.

The city recovered much of its prosperity in the eighteenth century. Its Greek population had considerable self-government under a council of primates drawn from the leading families and the metropolitan bishop, and taxation was light. English visitors in the 1760s reported about 10,000 inhabitants, roughly four-fifths of them Christian, and a Turkish community settled since the conquest whose relations with their Christian neighbours were friendlier than elsewhere. The town lived chiefly by pasture rather than agriculture, and exported leather, soap, grain, oil, honey and wax, mostly to Constantinople and France.

The peace broke in 1752–53, when a pasha killed notables who protested at his abuses and was besieged on the Acropolis by the populace until the governor of Negroponte restored order, imprisoned the metropolitan bishop and fined the Greek community heavily. During the Orlov Revolt of 1770 the Athenians stayed cautious, and it was only the intervention of the tax farmer Ismail Agha that spared the city reprisals; it paid an indemnity instead. His successor Hadji Ali Haseki extorted large sums and seized property over twenty years of on-and-off rule until his execution in 1795. Between 1801 and 1805 Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, had fifty pieces of sculpture removed from the Parthenon and the Erechtheion. A Greek insurgency captured Athens in 1822, the Ottomans retook it in 1826 with the Acropolis holding out until June 1827, and the monuments again suffered badly. Ottoman forces withdrew in March 1833, leaving a town of an estimated 400 houses around the Acropolis in the Plaka.

Athens was chosen in 1834 to replace Nafplio as the capital of the new Greek kingdom, largely for historical and sentimental reasons; the war of independence had reduced it to a town of some four to five thousand people in a loose scatter of houses at the foot of the Acropolis. Otto of Bavaria, proclaimed king in 1832, commissioned Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert to draw up a city plan; theirs was a triangle set between the Acropolis, the ancient cemetery of Kerameikos and the new royal palace, laid out to make the continuity between the modern and the ancient city plain. The public buildings followed over the next sixty years — the university in 1837, the National Gardens in 1840, the National Library in 1842, the royal palace that now houses parliament in 1843, the Zappeion in 1878 and the Academy in 1885 — and in 1896 Athens hosted the first modern Olympic Games.

The city's second period of explosive growth came out of catastrophe. After the Greco-Turkish War and the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, more than a million Greek refugees expelled from Asia Minor were resettled in Greece under the population exchange with Turkey. Suburbs such as Nea Ionia and Nea Smyrni began as refugee settlements on the edge of Athens, and the population of the city doubled.

Athens was occupied by the Axis during the Second World War and suffered terrible privations in its later years, the Great Famine falling heavily on the city. Several resistance organisations operated inside Athens, EAM being the main one. Liberation was followed by the Dekemvriana, heavy fighting in the city between communist forces and government forces backed by the British, and then by the Greek Civil War. Once the civil war was over the population boomed through the 1950s and 1960s as people moved in from the villages and the islands to find work.

Greek entry into the European Union in 1981 brought a flood of investment and worsening environmental problems; pollution was corroding the marble of the monuments and traffic vibration weakening ancient foundations, and those problems were the main reason Athens failed to win the 1996 centenary Olympics. The city and the government then built a new airport and metro system and restricted cars in the centre, and Athens was awarded the 2004 Summer Olympics. In 2008 the killing of a fifteen-year-old student by an officer set off riots that began in the city. Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece and the capital of the Attica region; the municipality held 643,452 people in 2021 and the urban area more than 3.6 million, and the city contains two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Acropolis and the medieval Daphni Monastery.