ATHENS (Ἀθ/νχ). - Capital of Attica and of the present Kingdom of Greece.
I. ATHENS IN ANTIQUITY
A. is a pre-Hellenic city. The acropolis, which constituted its primitive nucleus, was inhabited in the Neolithic age. The Athenians, who considered themselves Ionians and autochthonous, attributed its most ancient fortifications to the Pelasgians. Numerous traces of Aegean-Minoan civilization are found in it and in Attica. Toward the end of the Mycenaean age, when the Ionians had already for many centuries (the immigration dates to the 2nd millennium) been fused with the original inhabitants, A., beyond the polis or citadel (acropolis is a late term), already had an asty, that is, an undefended settlement scattered over the surrounding heights. At what age the name dates back, whether or not it is Hellenic, and in what relationship it stands to that of Athena, who preserves the traces of the Minoan palace goddess and who at a certain moment replaced the more ancient divinities of Cecrops and Erechtheus, is unknown. At the dawn of the historical age, A., as a city-state, comprised the whole of Attica, previously divided into small cantonal states. Their union into a single polis (synoecism) is attributed by tradition to Theseus: modern criticism regards it as a gradual process.
The history of the constitution of A. comprises five phases: monarchy, aristocracy, timocracy, tyranny, democracy, of which a moderate phase and an extreme phase are distinguished. The monarchy belongs to the mythical age: in the 7th century B.C. the king had already descended from the acropolis and was an elective magistrate: the government consisted of the college of the nine archons: the eponymous archon, the king, who had religious duties, the polemarch, and six thesmothetes. The organs of the State are: the Boulé or Council, to which only the nobles had access, and the Ecclesia or popular Assembly. The population is divided into 4 tribes (the 4 Ionian tribes), and into phratries: the ancient kinship groups or γένη, with the formation of large landed property, developed into closed gentilician organizations and constituted a title of nobility: their members are called eupatrids. Those who are not part of the nobles, that is, the plebs (πλῆθος), have their own associations of a religious character: the thiasoi and the orgeones. Territorial organizations intended to provide what was necessary for the fleet are the naucraries. The nobles, masters of most of the land, have the monopoly of the magistracies. Opposed to them are the middle farmers, the backbone of the political army, and the new class of merchants, formed with the introduction of coinage and the development of trade. From these, supported by the rural plebs, largely enslaved to the nobility, and by the seafarers, begins the revolutionary movement which, after a century and a half, would lead to the triumph of democracy. A first conquest was in 621 B.C. the legislation of Draco, which withdrew crimes of blood from the private vengeance of the γένη. Solon, a eupatrid but of middle condition, archon in 594 with extraordinary powers, in order to compose the clash between the nobility and the plebs and to avert civil war, abolished the claim on land and on the person, which had as its consequence the cancellation of debts, codified civil law with innovations intended to break the patrimonial unity of the gentilician groups, and transformed the regime from aristocratic into timocratic or census-based, distributing political rights according to the 4 fiscal classes already previously existing. To the noble Boulé, which, from the Hill of Ares or Areopagus, where it sat as a tribunal for voluntary crimes of blood, retained par excellence the name of Boulé of the Areopagus, and which was formed by magistrates leaving office, who held the right to it for life, he added a second elective annual Boulé of 400 members (100 for each tribe). To the thetes, that is, to the propertyless, he left the right to be part of the Ecclesia, but gave a weapon which later proved most powerful, with the institution of the Heliaia, a popular court of appeal, and with the right granted to anyone to come forward as public accuser of any transgression of the law. But the struggles continued, and the conclusion was what Solon had predicted: tyranny, the instrument which, in most Greek cities, democracy used to overthrow the privilege of the nobles. In 561 Pisistratus, brought to power by the popular party of the Mountain (Diacria), seized the acropolis and, after a decade, reigned until his death (527), leaving power without opposition to his sons Hippias and Hipparchus. It was a period of peace and great prosperity, favored by the policy of maritime expansion which, having eliminated the competition of Megara and consolidated the conquest of Salamis, established itself on the Thracian Chersonese and at the