The following excerpts adapted from Athens: City of Wisdom published in the UK by Head of Zeus
by Bruce Clark
When students in the Western world are introduced to global history, they are often told that civilization owes a particular debt to events which unfolded on two stony citadels in different parts of the eastern Mediterranean. At least physically, the two places have something in common. Both these natural formations surge dramatically out of the ground, rising to outcrops which are naturally flattish and can be made flatter still. Both have been defensive strongholds, blessed with secure water supplies, though neither in the end proved unassailable. Despite these common features, their significance has been understood in very different ways.
One is Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, seen as the home of monotheism, and the other is the Acropolis of Athens, whose monuments are revered as a testament to human reason, skill and freedom. This book will be about one of those citadels, and the civilization that arose around it, although currents flowing from the two places did eventually swirl together.
The plaza which dominates the Old City of Jerusalem is revered, of course, for its spiritual history, as a locus of carefully orchestrated encounter between man and a single Deity. The other citadel is associated by most modern admirers with a different story, one that focuses more on earthly achievement. The shimmering marble structures which crown the Acropolis are admired as the most tangible survival of a society where mankind, so to speak, stood on its own feet. In today’s understanding of things, ancient Athens compels respect as a cradle of humanism.
This was a society, it seems, where instead of bowing meekly before one or more gods, brilliant minds engaged in deliberation whose outcome was genuinely open. A community where weighty matters of war and peace, as well as routine daily administration, were tackled through the interplay of well-trained intellects that knew how to assess arguments and draw conclusions. With approval, modern historians note what seems like an emerging, secular sophistication in the Athenians’ understanding of their own collective story: not as a capricious game acted out by divine powers, but rather as an interplay of human motives which may be complex but can ultimately be dissected and described. Contemporary admirers also love the fact that Athens had well-crafted laws and institutions whose very purpose was to transcend the personal vicissitudes of clever, ambitious individuals, and the whims of jealous deities, and instead serve the broad public interest in a consistent way. Days before handing over the presidency to Donald Trump in 2016, Barack Obama visited the Acropolis and observed warmly that ‘it was here twenty-five centuries ago, in the rocky hills of this city, that a new idea emerged’. The name of that idea, he enthused, was demokratia… in other words a system where kratos, the power to rule, came from the demos, the people.
As a description of the Athenian golden age and its ideals, all that is more true than false. But it also leaves out an important aspect of the city’s legacy: ancient Athens never ceased to be an intensely spiritual place, a space where the transcendental seemed ever-present. True enough, the modern mind fixates on the human achievements of ancient Athens. It marvels at the logistical and practical skill that was required to haul so much shining marble up a steep hill and then fashion the glistening white rock into structures that enchant us with a false appearance of symmetry. Like medieval cathedrals, these monuments required a huge input of human brain-power, applied to engineering, geometry and the properties of stone. But just as the modern mind finds it hard to imagine the spiritual ideals which underpinned those cathedrals, it also underestimates the spiritual aspect of the Acropolis.
In fact, neither ancient Athens as a whole, nor its greatest monuments, was a secular space in the sense we now understand. The finest monument of all, the Parthenon, was not a parliament building but a temple, in the particular sense that the ancient Greeks gave the word: not a place to pray or sacrifice (that happened outdoors, nearby) but a building that housed a sacred statue whose creation and installation was in itself an act of piety.
The whole complex erected on the Acropolis was a giant statement of homage and thanks to Athena, the city’s protectress, and to other deities. It was not just the structures on top of the citadel that were invested with holiness. The geological formation was known as the Hiera Brakhos, the sacred rock. Democratic debates happened not on the Acropolis but on a nearby hill, the Pnyx, which attracts too few visitors. Moreover, a remarkably high proportion of the democratic assembly’s business consisted of micromanaging public religious practices: which sacrifices should be made to which gods and where.
Whatever their penchant for rational investigation, the ancient Athenians resembled and often outdid their fellow Hellenes in having an intense feeling for the numinous. That is what makes their story so interesting and elusive. For them it came naturally to think of certain features of the natural world, from springs to entire mountains, as liminal spots, locations where mankind stood at the boundary between everyday reality and some transcendent world. The best Athenian citizens certainly did have powerful, reasoning, self-critical minds, but they also had a highly charged sense of the spiritual.
It is not hard to see why the Acropolis was always perceived as one intensely liminal place, by virtue of its form and location. It overlooks a well-watered plain, surrounded by four great mountains as well as smaller hills. In ancient times, all these peaks abounded in beautiful vegetation. Mount Hymettus, to the east, was prized for its honey, Mount Pentelikon for its exceptionally pure marble. The sea sparkles at a safe distance: close enough to be convenient, but far enough away to avoid the city becoming a sitting target for maritime invaders. A series of natural, defensible harbours can be made out on the horizon. It seems entirely natural to give thanks for the very existence of a such a magnificent place.
But the way in which holiness, including the sanctity of certain locations, was understood by the ancient Greeks seems like the very opposite of monotheistic. For them, human destinies were guided not by a single, almighty Power but by a perpetual negotiation between human beings and an array of deities. The most important were twelve in number, but the list could easily be lengthened, and each deity had multiple manifestations, linked to particular places, communities or aspects of a turbulent personality. The gods were powerful and immortal, but very human in their passions and failings. The establishment of new cults was a creative, almost entrepreneurial, business. Ancient Greek religion, like ancient Greek politics, was irrepressibly prolix.
The Athenian Acropolis, including its underbelly and its inspiring surroundings, offered plenty of scope for ingenuity in the establishment of cults and focal points for religious energy, places that served to hold society together in common moments of ecstasy. The fortress itself was a honeycomb of caves and springs, and there are perfectly good geological reasons for this. The top layer of the Acropolis consists of limestone, formed more than 100 million years ago by the decaying shells of crustaceans from a long-vanished sea. Beneath there is marl and sandstone, which was formed 30 million years later. Vast tectonic forces, pushing Africa closer to Europe and Asia, forced the limestone above the marl. This limestone, although very hard, is also porous. With its faintly acidic content, rainwater can find places to seep through, until it reaches the impenetrable bedrock below. As a result, the whole rock is latticed with caves, fissures and springs. These have served practical purposes as well as firing the spiritual imagination of countless generations.
We do not know much about the religious practices of – or indeed anything much at all about – the first people who explored this rock and its cavities. But one of the oldest objects discovered in the vicinity of the Acropolis is a plump female figure, dating from before 4000 BCE, which hints at an agricultural society where fertility and reproduction were particularly revered. Almost all the societies that occupied the place in later eras gave greater weight to sky-gods or mountain-gods with masculine characteristics, or else to goddesses who had rather male qualities. Whole theories of religion have been built around this contrast, although it is dangerous to read too much into a single archaeological find.
One thing we do know about those Neolithic people is that they knew where to find and extract water. Some twenty-two shallow wells, dating from 3500 BCE to 3000 BCE, have been identified on the north-western edge of the Acropolis. The societies that dug these wells vanished in the subsequent millennium, but human settlement reappears in the Middle Bronze Age, from 2000 BCE; and sometime between 1400 BCE and 1300 BCE, Athens began playing its part in the great Mycenaean civilization which burst forth in the form of royal courts dotted across the Greek world.
The fortified palace on the Athens Acropolis was not the greatest of these courts, but by 1250 BCE it boasted impressive walls, up to 10 metres tall and 5 metres thick, parts of which can still be seen. These immense piles of stone are known as the Cyclopean walls because later generations felt they could only have been heaved into place by a mythical colossus, like the one-eyed giant or Cyclops described in Homer’s epic poetry. Artists’ impressions of the palace suggest a magnificent, multi-floored complex where a king was in command of a busy bureaucracy and all kinds of merchandise were imported, processed and exported. But these are all guesses, based on the discovery of the defences as well as the foundations of an impressive edifice.
In all probability, the ruler of Mycenaean Athens did not hold sway even over the surrounding region of Attica, where several different fiefdoms, each with its own burial practices, have been identified. Some of these neighbouring micro-kingdoms grew rich from exporting silver and lead from the mines at Laurion in southern Attica. To judge by the paucity of its artefacts and burial sites, however, Mycenaean Athens did not enjoy such prosperity.
There is one particularly impressive well on the north-western side of the Acropolis, known as the Mycenaean spring. It lay at the bottom of a dizzying 35-metre cleft which had opened up when a piece of rock detached itself from the surface. About 1200 BCE, eight flights of steps, some wooden and some stone, were built to provide access for anyone intrepid enough to climb down. It seems to have been used for a mere twenty-five years before the shaft collapsed.
Over the following century, the entire Mycenaean world implodes inexplicably, ushering in what posterity calls a Dark Age. Only about 3,000 years later, when young Greek resistance fighters were looking for a way to challenge the Nazis who had just occupied Athens, did this extraordinary, vertiginous hole in the Rock regain its strategic importance.
Whatever was happening on the surface of the Rock, it is a fair bet that people never stopped exploring caves or wondering about the divinities or half-divine city founders with which these cavities might be connected. Through those caves, early Athenians found ways to understand how their own lives intersected with those of the gods and demigods.
The neighbouring Cave C was a dwelling-place for the greatest of sky-gods, Zeus, the hurler of thunderbolts. So vast was his reach that his presence could be felt deep underground as well as hurtling through the heavens. An adjoining cavity, rediscovered only a century ago, has an association with quite specific events in classical Greek history. It was dedicated to Pan, the sensual, cloven-hoofed goat-god, by grateful Athenians who credited him with sowing confusion in the ranks of their Persian invaders in 490 BCE.
Walk a bit further and there is a cave associated with Aphrodite, goddess of love, and her son Eros. At the eastern end of the Rock, beyond easy reach for a walker, is the largest cave of all, 14 metres wide. This one is dedicated to yet another figure from the city’s foundation pageant: Aglaurus, a daughter of King Kekrops, who jumped off the Rock to her death in order to save the city. As we shall see, the mythology of early Athens includes several stories of a king (depicted as a half-snake or with snakes) with two or three daughters who jump off the Acropolis to their deaths, saving the city.
The association with the snakes was a way of expressing the Athenians’ belief that they had emerged from the earth, that they were native to the city and had never lived anywhere else. Snakiness is a characteristic ascribed to kings named as Kekrops, or else Erechtheus or Erichthonius.1 Kekrops is sometimes presented as a forebear of Erechtheus, and Erechtheus as the grandfather of Erichthonius. But in truth they may all be variants on the same shadowy tradition.
Athenians remembered another early king whom they regarded as a real-life figure even though he surpassed other mortals in his strength and ingenuity. Theseus was a kind of superman, whose importance as an Athenian ancestor seemed to increase as the city itself grew in confidence. The story of Theseus is in some ways a grotesque tale of father–son competition in which the hero’s mother is relegated to the background.
It starts with Aegeus, an Athenian king who confesses while visiting a fellow monarch, Pittheus of Troezen, that he is unhappy at being childless. Pittheus duly offers the visiting sovereign his daughter Aethra, who soon becomes pregnant, although it is possible that the child she is carrying has been fathered by the sea-god, Poseidon. Aegeus then returns to Athens, having carefully left open the possibility that a son and heir might emerge from his brief liaison. He buries his sandals and a sword under a rock and tells Aethra that when their son grows up, he should move the rock and take the tokens for himself as evidence of his royal parentage. Theseus is raised in Troezen and when he grows up, he duly uncovers the precious objects and heads to Athens to claim his throne. On his journey, he performs six heroic labours, including killing a giant sow and pitching into the sea a bully who made people wash his feet. In the holy city of Eleusis, Theseus sees off a local king who liked to wrestle visitors to the ground and then kill them. But when he arrives in Athens, his father is unimpressed by his feats and fails to recognize him. However, Aegeus’ wife Medea does recognize Theseus and in order to prevent him from being acknowledged as heir and assuming the kingdom in place of her own son, she tries to poison him.....
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About the Book: Athens: City of Wisdom tells the tale of a city that occupies a unique place in the cultural memory of the West. Each of the book's twenty-one chapters focuses on a critical 'moment' in the city's long history, from the reforms of the lawmaker Solon in the sixth century BCE to the travails of early twenty-first-century Athens, as a rapidly expanding city struggles with the legacy of a global economic crisis. Bruce Clark has a rich and revealing sequence of stories to tell – not only of the familiar golden age of Classical Athens, of the removal from the Acropolis of the Parthenon marbles by agents of the 7th Earl of Elgin in the early nineteenth century, or of the holding of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896; but also of the less fĂȘted later years of antiquity, when St Paul preached on the Areopagus and neo Platonists refounded the Academy that Sulla's legions had desecrated. He also delves into Athens' forgotten medieval centuries, unearthing jewels gleaming in the Byzantine twilight, and tales of Christian fortitude and erratic Turkish governance from the four centuries of Ottoman rule that followed. Few places have enjoyed a history so rich in artistic creativity and the making of ideas as Athens; or one so curiously patterned by alternating cycles of turbulence and quietness. Writing with scholarly rigour and undisguised affection, Bruce Clark brings three thousand years of Athenian history vividly to life.
Copyright © Bruce Clark, 2021
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