ATENE ('Αθ/νχι). – Capital of Attica and of the present-day Kingdom of Greece.
SUMMARY: I. A. in antiquity. – II. A. in the Bible. –
III. Christianity in A
IV. Churches and monasteries of A
V. The archdiocese of A
VI. The ordinariate of A.I. A. IN ANTIQUITY. – A. is a pre-Hellenic city. The acropolis, which constituted its primitive nucleus, was inhabited in the Neolithic period. The Athenians, who considered themselves Ionians and autochthonous, attributed its earliest fortifications to the Pelasgians. Numerous traces of Aegean-Minoan civilization are found in the city and in Attica. Toward the end of the Mycenaean period, when the Ionians had already been fused for many centuries (the immigration dates to the second millennium) with the original inhabitants, A., in addition to the polis or citadel (acropolis is a late term), already had a sista, that is, an undefended settlement scattered over the surrounding heights. At what period the name originated, whether or not it is Hellenic, and what relation it bears to the name of Athena—which preserves traces of the Minoan goddess of the palace and which at a certain point replaced the more ancient divinities of Cecrops and Erechtheus—is unknown. At the dawn of the historical period, A., as a city-state, comprised all Attica, previously divided into small cantonal states. Tradition attributes their union into a single polis (synoecism) to Theseus; modern criticism regards it as a gradual process.
The history of A.’s constitution comprises five phases: monarchy, aristocracy, timocracy, tyranny, and democracy, of which a moderate and an extreme phase are distinguished. The monarchy belongs to the mythical age: in the seventh century B.C. the king had already descended from the acropolis and was an elected magistrate; the government consisted of the college of the nine archons: the eponymous archon, the king, who had religious duties, the polemarch, and the six thesmothetai. The organs of the state were the Boulé, or Council, to which only nobles had access, and the Ecclesia, or popular Assembly. The population was divided into four tribes (the four Ionian tribes) and into phratries: the ancient kinship groups, or γένε, with the formation of large estates, had developed into closed gentilitial organizations and constituted a title to nobility; their members were called eupatrids. Those who did not belong to the nobility, that is, the plebs (πλ/δ/νς), had their own religious associations: the thiasi and the orgelni. Territorial organizations intended to provide what was necessary for the fleet were the naucraries. The nobles, masters of most of the land, held a monopoly on the magistracies. Opposed to them were the medium landholders, the backbone of the political army, and the new class of merchants, formed through the introduction of coinage and the development of commerce. From these groups, supported by the rural plebs, largely subjected to the nobility, and by the seafarers, the revolutionary movement began which, after a century and a half, would lead to the triumph of democracy. A first achievement was the legislation of Draco in 621 B.C., which removed blood crimes from the private vengeance of the γένε. Solon, an eupatrid but of moderate means, archon in 594 with extraordinary powers, in order to resolve the conflict between the nobility and the plebs and avert civil war, abolished mortgage on land and on the person, thereby annulling debts; he codified civil law with innovations intended to break up the patrimonial unity of the gentilitial groups, and transformed the regime from aristocratic to timocratic, or census-based, distributing political rights according to the four fiscal classes that had already existed. To the noble Boulé, which, because it met on the Hill of Ares, or Areopagus, where it sat as a court for voluntary blood crimes, retained above all the name Boulé of the Areopagus, and which was composed of magistrates leaving office, who thereby acquired lifelong membership, he added a second, annually elected Boulé of 400 members (100 for each tribe). To the thetes, that is, the propertyless, he left the right to belong to the Ecclesia, but he gave them a weapon that later proved extremely powerful, through the establishment of the Heliaia, a popular court of appeal, and through the right granted to anyone to come forward publicly as the accuser of any violation of the law. But the struggles continued, and the outcome was what Solon had predicted: tyranny, the instrument that democracy in most Greek cities 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, apart from a decade-long interruption, ruled 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 a policy of maritime expansion which, after eliminating the competition of Megara and consolidating the conquest of Salamis, established itself on the Thracian Chersonese and at the…