Tag Archives: Phidias

If you had been a citizen of the ancient Greek city of Athens on a fine spring morning in 409 B.C., you would have gathered with thousands of your fellow citizens on a hillside inside the city. You would then have listened carefully to the discussion of various matters of business, conducted by the chairman and secretary of the meeting from a platform below and facing you. You would have seen an Athenian citizen thread his way from the hillside to this platform. This was a sure sign that he had a proposal to make to the voters. The citizen turned toward the assembled throng and spoke in a strong, clear voice. A man named Thrasybulus, he said, should be rewarded with a golden crown for his services to Athens. When the speaker paused, another citizen came to the platform. Yes, by all means thank Thrasybulus and give him a golden crown, urged the second speaker. He went on, these acts were not enough, because Thrasybulus was a foreigner, the best reward for serving Athens so faithfully and so well would be to make him an Athenian citizen. Would the voters of Athens do this? he asked. The chairman called for a vote by a show of hands and tellers counted the votes. A majority was in favour of the proposal and it was declared officially to have been approved by the voters of Athens. The secretary had a copy of the proposal carved on a marble slab to make the record permanent and there the record is to this day, over 2800 years later, but still readable! This old record tells us that Athenian citizens held meetings, discussed their own problems, and decided for themselves What they would do. The voters, instead of a pharaoh or a king, made …

When Themistocles and the people of Athens came home from Salamis, they found only the ashes of a city. Their houses and shops were gone. The Acropolis was littered with chunks of broken limestone and smoke-blackened statues, the ruins of their sacred temples. The years of war had taught the Athenians courage and victory gave them pride and hope. They began to build again. While the citizens planned new houses, Themistocles planned new walls – walls around the city, walls to protect the harbour at Piraeus and walls along the four miles of road that connected the two. When they were finished, Athens would be an island, surrounded by ramparts of stone instead of the sea and as safe as Salamis. The Spartans already jealous of the Athenian navy, wanted badly to stop the work on the walls. They wrote to Themistocles and asked him to join them in a pact to outlaw all city walls in Greece. Themistocles knew well enough what they were after, but he agreed to go to Sparta to talk. Once he was there, he kept the talk going for weeks. When the Spartans heard that the walls were still going up, they complained. Themistocles suggested that they send ambassadors to Athens to look for themselves. When the ambassadors returned, they said that the walls were indeed being worked on. “No” Themistocles said, “by now they are finished” and he left the conference. It was a Spartan sort of trick and no one blamed Themistocles for it. In fact, many of the Greeks were pleased, not only because Sparta had been fooled, but Athens was the city they looked to as their defender against the Persians. The Spartans had lost interest in fighting Persians, once their own land was safe. Athens, however, had carried the …