The Rise of Athens

Copyright © 2016 by Anthony Everitt

Maps copyright © 2016 by David Lindroth, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Illustration Credits: “Athens Acropolis/Reconstruction”: akg-images/Peter Connolly; “Achilles and Patroclus,” “Plato,” “Hetairas”: Bibi Saint Pol; “Parthenon,” “Athena Relief”: Harrieta 171; “Athena Parthenos”: Dean Dixon; “Themistocles,” “Foundry”: Sailko; “Pericles,” “Athenian Hoplite,” “Discus Thrower”: Marie-Lan Nguyen; “Demosthenes”: Gunnar Bach Pedersen; “Greek and Persian Soldiers”: Alexikoua; “Helmet of Miltiades”: William Neuheisel; “Lion of Chaeronea”: Philipp Pilhofer; “Socrates”: Yair Haklkai; “Aristotle,” “Sacrificed Boar,” “Symposium”: Jastrow; “Baby and Mother”: Marsyas.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Everitt, Anthony, author.

Title: The rise of Athens: the story of the world’s greatest civilization / Anthony Everitt.

Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016014843| ISBN 9780812994582 | ISBN 9780812994599 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Athens (Greece)—History.

Classification: LCC DF285 .E94 2016 | DDC 938/.5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016014843

Ebook ISBN 9780812994599

randomhousebooks.com

Cover design: Anna Bauer Carr

Cover painting: Leo von Klenze, Ideal View of the Acropolis and the Areopagus in Athens, 1846 (Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich/bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, N.Y.)

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

List of Maps

Introduction

Three’s Company

Chapter 1: National Hero

Chapter 2: A State of War

Chapter 3: The Persian Mule

The Invention of Democracy

Chapter 4: The Shaking-Off

Chapter 5: Friend of the Poor

Chapter 6: Charioteers of the Soul

Chapter 7: Inventing Democracy

The Persian Threat

Chapter 8: Eastern Raiders

Chapter 9: Fox as Hedgehog

Chapter 10: Invasion

Chapter 11: “The Acts of Idiots”

Chapter 12: “O Divine Salamis”

The Empire Builders

Chapter 13: League of Nations

Chapter 14: The Falling-Out

Chapter 15: The Kindly Ones

Chapter 16: “Crowned with Violets”

The Great War

Chapter 17: The Prisoners on the Island

Chapter 18: The Man Who Knew Nothing

Chapter 19: Downfall

Chapter 20: The End of Democracy?

A Long Farewell

Chapter 21: Sparta’s Turn

Chapter 22: Chaeronea—“Fatal to Liberty”

Chapter 23: Afterword—“A God-Forsaken Hole”

Photo Insert

Glossary

Time Line

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Sources

Bibliography

Notes

By Anthony Everitt

About the Author

PREFACE

As a small child I devoured a Victorian storybook that told tales of Greek and Roman mythology. I read every word, except for the sickly sweet poems that were scattered across its pages.

My paternal grandmother noticed my interest in the ancient world and bought me three Penguin Classics, then a new publishing enterprise. She chose E. V. Rieu’s versions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and a translation of Plato’s Symposium. A farmer’s wife, she was no classicist, and the last of these books came a little early for a prepubertal child, who was mystified by the references to Hellenic homosexuality. But I could not have been given a better sense, smell, flavor, of Greek civilization. Homer and Plato introduced me to a world that was new and ravishing, which, for all the tragedy and the bloodshed, radiated the sunlight and luminous skies of free thought.

For a span of two hundred years in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the ancient Athenians pioneered astonishing advances in almost every field of human endeavor. They invented the only real or complete democracy (the word itself is Greek) that has ever existed outside the classical age. Whereas we merely elect representatives to act on our behalf, citizens then met in assembly and took every important decision themselves. (I need to enter a reservation here: the franchise was limited to adult males and so excluded two large social groups—women and slaves.)

The Athenians believed in reason, and its power to solve the mysteries of the human condition and of nature. They established the concepts and language of philosophy, and raised issues with which today’s thinkers still wrestle. They pioneered the arts of tragedy and comedy, architecture and sculpture. They invented history as the accurate narration and interpretation of past events. With their fellow-Greeks they developed mathematics and the natural sciences.