Athens and the Polis: Citizens, Gods and Empire
Greek city-states shared sanctuaries, an alphabet and poetry. Athens built self-government for its adult male citizens, turned an alliance against Persia into an empire, and after its defeat by Sparta put Socrates on trial.
Start this guided tour on the mapPart 1
Greek-speakers lived in hundreds of independent city-states, each a polis with its own laws and cults, yet they met at shared sanctuaries. From about the 8th century BCE offerings accumulated at Apollo's sanctuary at Delphi, where cities consulted the priestess, the Pythia, before founding colonies, making laws or going to war. How the oracle worked is known mainly from later writers and is still debated.
Part 2
Probably in the 8th century BCE, Greeks in contact with Phoenician traders adapted the Phoenician consonant script, turning signs for sounds that Greek lacked into vowels. The oldest Greek inscriptions, scratched on pottery, come from Euboea, Athens and Euboean settlements in Italy. The Greeks called their letters 'Phoenician things', and through the Etruscans the script became the parent of the Latin alphabet.
- Greek alphabet — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 3
On Lesbos, around 600 BCE, Sappho composed songs to be sung to the lyre about love, desire, family and religious festivals, many of them addressed to women. Ancient scholars collected her poems in nine books, but they survive mostly as quotations and papyrus fragments, and only one poem is certainly complete. Her songs show a Greek world beyond war and assemblies, while much of her later biography is legend.
- Sappho — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 4
In Athens, conflict between rich and poor led to Solon's appointment as archon, traditionally in 594 BCE, though some scholars date his reforms later. He cancelled debts secured on the debtor's own person, banned the enslavement of Athenians for debt and tied the right to hold office to four property classes. Fragments of his own poems and the later Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians are the main sources.
- Solon — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 5
In 508/7 BCE Cleisthenes reorganised the citizens into ten new tribes and a Council of 500, laying the ground for a system in which the assembly of citizens decided public affairs. Citizens meant adult men of Athenian descent: women, enslaved people and resident foreigners, the metics, were excluded. Other Greek cities also experimented with forms of popular government.
- Cleisthenes of Athens — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 6
After Xerxes' invasion was defeated in 479 BCE, Athens and many Aegean and Ionian cities formed an alliance in 478/7 to continue the war against the Achaemenid Empire, keeping a common treasury on Delos. Athens led it from the start, forced members such as Naxos and Thasos to stay in and moved the treasury to Athens in 454. Thucydides and the tribute lists inscribed on stone are why historians speak of an Athenian empire.
- Delian League — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 7
From 447 BCE, in a building programme associated with Pericles, Athens raised a new temple to Athena on the Acropolis; the Parthenon was finished in 438 and its sculpture by about 432. Plutarch reports that Pericles' opponents accused him of spending the allies' tribute on the city's monuments, but how much League money paid for the buildings is still debated. The temple celebrated Athens and its goddess in marble.
Part 8
Athens lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta in 404 BCE; a brief oligarchy followed before democracy was restored. In 399 an Athenian jury convicted Socrates of impiety and of corrupting the young, and he was put to death by drinking hemlock. Socrates wrote nothing: his trial is known from the accounts of his followers Plato and Xenophon, who defend him, so the prosecutors' motives are still debated.