ATHENAE (Ἀθῆναι). — Capital of Attica and of the present 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 formed its primitive nucleus, was inhabited in the Neolithic age. The Athenians, who considered themselves Ionians and autochthonous, attributed its earliest fortifications to the Pelasgians. Numerous in it and in Attica are the traces of the Egeo-Minoan civilization. Toward the end of the Mycenaean age, when the Ionians had already been fused for many centuries (the migration dates to the 11th millennium) with the original inhabitants, A., besides the polis or citadel (the term acropolis is late), already had an astu, i.e., an undefended settlement, scattered over the surrounding heights. When the name originated and whether it is Hellenic or not, and in what relation it stands to that of Athena, which preserves traces of the palace's motion, and which at a certain moment replaced the more ancient deities of Cecrops and Erechtheus, is unknown. At the dawn of the historical age, A., as a city-state, encompassed all of Attica, previously divided into small cantonal states. The union of these into a single polis (synoecism) is attributed by tradition to Theseus; modern criticism considers it a gradual process.
The history of A.'s constitution comprises five phases: monarchy, aristocracy, timocracy, tyranny, and democracy, of which a modern 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 a college of nine archons: the eponymous archon, the king (who had religious duties), the polemarch, and six thesmothetae. The organs of the state were the Boule or Council, to which only nobles had access, and the Ecclesia or popular assembly. The population was divided into four tribes (the four Ionic tribes), and into phratries: the ancient kinship groups or γένη, with the formation of large estates, had developed into closed gentilicial organizations and constituted a title of nobility; their members were called Eupatrids. Those who did not belong to the nobles, i.e., the plebs (πῆλοι, δῆμος), had their own associations of a religious character: the thiasoi and the orgeones. Territorial organizations intended to provide for the fleet were the nauticies. The nobles, owners of most of the land, monopolized the magistracies. Opposed to them were the middle-class farmers, the backbone of the hoplite 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, began the revolutionary movement that, 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 removed blood crimes from the private vengeance of the γένη. Solon, of noble birth but of middle condition, archon in 594 with extraordinary powers, to compose the clash between the nobility and the plebs and avert civil war, abolished the mortgage on land and on the person, which had the effect of annulling debts; he codified civil law with innovations intended to break the patrimonial unity of the gentilicial groups, and transformed the regime from aristocratic to timocratic or census-based, distributing political rights according to the four property classes already existing. To the noble Boule, which, from the Areopagus hill where it sat as a court for voluntary blood crimes, retained the name of Boule of the Areopagus par excellence, and which was composed of former magistrates who had the right to serve for life, he added a second elective Boule of 400 members (100 for each tribe). To the thetes, i.e., the landless, he left the right to be part of the Ecclesia, but gave them a weapon that later proved very powerful, with the institution of the Eliaea, a popular court of appeal, and with the right granted to anyone to act as a public accuser of any violation of the law. But the struggles continued, and the outcome was that which Solon had foreseen: tyranny, the instrument by which, in most Greek cities, democracy overthrew the privilege of the nobles. In 561 Pisistratus, backed by the popular party of the Mountain (Diacria), seized the acropolis and, after a decade, ruled until his death (527), leaving power uncontested to his sons Hippias and Hipparchus. It was a period of peace and great prosperity, favored by a policy of maritime expansion that, after eliminating Megara's competition and consolidating the conquest of Salamis, extended to the Thracian Chersonese and