The Rise of Athens

It is hard to be precise about the value of money, because the relative worth of different products varies from time to time and from economy to economy. The principal units of the Athenian currency were

6 obols = 1 drachma

100 drachmas = 1 mina

60 minas = 1 talent

One drachma was a day’s pay for a foot soldier or a skilled worker in the fifth and fourth centuries. From 425 B.C. a juror received from the state a daily allowance of half a drachma or three obols, just enough to maintain a family of three at a basic level of subsistence. So the payment was adequate rather than extravagant. A talent was a unit of weight and equaled twenty-six kilograms; it also signified the monetary value of twenty-six kilograms of silver. The two hundred rowers who crewed a trireme during the Peloponnesian War were paid a talent for one month’s worth of work.

An obol was a small silver coin. It was placed in a dead man’s mouth so that he had the wherewithal to pay the ferryman Charon for passage across the river Acheron to the underworld.

I omit the term B.C. (or A.D.) with dates except in the rare cases where there might otherwise be a misunderstanding.

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In many respects we can recognize the people of Athens; this is no great surprise, for they pioneered so many of the fields of knowledge that are current and alive today. But in so many ways they inhabited a different moral and technological universe. Their motto was “know yourself”; they simply would not have understood the Christian command to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

If I have helped to bridge the gap between ourselves and our Hellenic forebears and conveyed a little of my enthusiasm for the founders of our civilization, I shall be well pleased.

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LIST OF MAPS

The Aegean Basin

Ancient Athens

The Plain of Marathon

The Battle of Salamis

Athens, Piraeus, and the Long Walls

The Battle of Chaeronea

INTRODUCTION

The young king from foreign and uncivilized Macedon forced the great city of Athens into submission and enslaved the whole of Hellas, together with its quarrelsome horde of city-states. This was not because he seriously disliked the Greeks. Far from it. He was deeply impressed by their military and cultural achievements. In fact, he longed to be accepted as a full and complete member of the Hellenic club.

He was Alexander the Great, son of Philip, and it was the year 334.

But what was the nature of Greekness and how did one get hold of it? The simplest way of answering the question was to study and digest the epic poem the Iliad. Set in a remote past, it concerned the ten-year siege of Troy, a city in Phrygia, by a Greek army.

Every Athenian, indeed every Greek, boy learned of heroes such as Achilles and Agamemnon, Hector and Odysseus, who fought in the war, and did his best to emulate them. Their deeds embodied Greekness. Alexander cast himself as the new Achilles, as the bravest Hellene of them all.

He first encountered the Iliad as a child and it guided his life. He took a copy with him on his travels and when a finely made casket was presented to him that had previously belonged to the Persian Great King he asked his friends what precious object he should keep inside it. All kinds of suggestions were made, but Alexander said firmly that he would deposit his Iliad there for safekeeping and for splendor.

Hellenes at home will have laughed at the royal upstart’s pretensions, but they were just as deeply indebted as Alexander was to the world that Homer conjured to life. It was here that they found their moral, personal, social, and political attitudes.

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In fact, it was a lost world, even when the Iliad was composed sometime towards the end of the eighth century. The poem was a long written text, but inspired by compositions learned by heart and spoken or sung at important social occasions. Homer may or may not have existed, we simply don’t know. He could have been one man, a collective, or even a woman. But anyone reading the poem will feel that he has been in the presence of a controlling mind, whatever its name and nature. (Its companion piece, the Odyssey, which describes the adventures of Odysseus, king of a small island off western Greece, and his ten-year journey home from Troy, may have been another author’s work.)

Did the Trojan War take place? We do not know. But if it or something like it was a historical event, it can be dated towards the end of the second millennium B.C. This marked the high point of a Bronze Age civilization that dominated Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. We call it Mycenaean after its main city Mycenae in the northeastern Peloponnese. It was its kings and warriors who sailed across the Aegean Sea and sacked Troy.