ATHOS MONTE TAV. XXV
At the top: MENOLOGIO N. 5 from the Dochiariu monastery (12th century). Notice of 14 Nov.
At the bottom: NUOVO TESTAMENTO N. 8 from the Dionisiu monastery. Beginning of St. Matthew (1133).
At the top: MENOLOGIO N. 5 from the Dochiariu monastery (12th century). Notice of 14 Nov.
At the bottom: NUOVO TESTAMENTO N. 8 from the Dionisiu monastery. Beginning of St. Matthew (1133).
ATHENS – Good Shepherd (4th century) – Museum.
Cape Sigeum. The city adorned itself with monuments and public works; artists and poets flocked there from every quarter. Dionysus, hitherto the god of the rural masses, acquired civic rights with the institution of the Great Dionysia: from his cult arose tragedy and comedy. In 513 the tyrant Hipparchus was killed by Harmodius and Aristogeiton; three years later the Alcmaeonidae and other nobles returned to the city with Spartan help and drove out Hippias. The Pisistratids had respected Solon’s constitution; their fall, far from restoring aristocracy, marked the triumph of democracy. The reform was carried out by the Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes, who, to break the power of the clan groups once and for all, divided the whole of Attica into demes and communes with autonomous administration, and reorganized the population into ten tribes, each comprising three trittyes or groups of demes arranged territorially. The organs of the state remained the same, except that the Solonian Boule of 400 was increased to 500, chosen by lot, fifty from each tribe, which took turns to hold the first prytany. To defend the institutions, the people were given the power to banish dangerous citizens (ostracism), which became a terrible weapon of party strife. With this constitution Athens withstood the Persian onslaught, securing the freedom of Greece in two memorable battles (Marathon 490, Salamis 480), and, having gained control of the sea, found itself at the head of a maritime league which in a few years became an empire. The fifth century was the period of Athens’ greatest power and flowering: it became not only the economic and political but also the spiritual centre of Greece; literature and the arts reached heights never surpassed, and as the “school of Hellas” (Thucydides) it maintained primacy into the following century. Democracy developed in an even more radical direction: the powers of the Areopagus were reduced in favour of the Council of 500 and the Heliaea, which gradually absorbed almost all civil and criminal jurisdiction; the lot was used to choose magistrates, except military and financial offices; the archonship was opened first to knights (487) and then to zeugites (457), i.e. practically to all citizens; and finally salaries were introduced for the judges and then for the Ecclesia, making government a true affair of the people. This led to the formation of a class of politicians, the greatest of whom was Pericles, Cleisthenes’ nephew, who for thirty years was the arbiter of Athens’ destiny. He resumed the policy of expansion and power of Pisistratus and Themistocles, but whether through his own excessive boldness or the insuperable difficulties of the circumstances, he barely maintained the previous positions and prepared Athens for the inevitable clash with Sparta. The Peloponnesian War (431–421; 415–404), in which the two rival cities, representing democracy and oligarchy respectively, pitted nearly all the Greek world against each other, ended in Athens’ defeat and the end of her empire. The walls were demolished, democracy declared defunct, and under the government of the Thirty installed by the Spartans Athens experienced one of the harshest tyrannies. Reaction was not long in coming, and in 403 the exiles returned under the leadership of Thrasybulus with Theban help and restored democracy. During the fourth century, taking advantage of the struggles between Sparta and Thebes and alternately allying with each while using Persian aid, Athens managed to regain some of the lost ground and to reconstitute on a federal and less imperialistic basis than before a second Delian League (377). But now a new power was appearing on the stage of history, Macedon. Athens’ struggle against Philip, amid general corruption and undermined by the extreme form to which democracy had come—where everything was at the mercy of the Assembly and thus of the orators who dominated it—is one of the most dramatic pages in Greek history, whose last champion of freedom was Demosthenes. After the battle of Chaeronea (338) the hegemony passed to Philip; an attempt at recovery after Alexander’s death (the Lamian War) failed miserably at Crannon (322). What Athens had been in the arts and letters in the fifth century, it became in the fourth in philosophy, which, opening with Socrates’ death (399), saw the foundation of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, true universities organized for scientific research, and the rise of the two schools that dominated the Alexandrian and Roman ages, Stoicism and Epicureanism. In the third century, during the struggles of the Diadochi and the kingdoms born of the division of Alexander’s empire, Athens, though retaining nominal autonomy, remained permanently under the surveillance of Macedonian garrisons and followed the turbulent vicissitudes of the age: three times it tried to regain independence and three times was crushed. In 267 it joined Egypt and Sparta against Antigonus Gonatas, but after a siege was forced to surrender (261). From then on every political function was at an end. In 197 at Cynoscephalae Philip V of Macedon was defeated by T. Q. Flamininus and Greece fell under Roman influence. During the First Mithridatic War Athens followed the revolt of the other Greek cities, but after a siege by Sulla it was taken in 86 and treated as a rebel. Both in the Republican and Imperial ages Athens preserved its institutions, but it was no more than a quiet city of studies, laden with memories and monuments. In this respect it still played a leading role until the age of Justinian, who in 529 AD closed its age-old university, still pagan, and dispersed its teachers.
II. ATHENS IN THE BIBLE
By about 163 BC Athens is recorded as a free city (2 Macc. 9:15).
Cape Sigeum. The city adorned itself with monuments and public works; artists and poets flocked there from every quarter. Dionysus, hitherto the god of the rural masses, acquired civic rights with the institution of the Great Dionysia: from his cult arose