The Imperial Power of Athens

Athena was already a goddess in the Aegean before the coming of the greeks.-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja (Mistress Athena) is referred to in the Knossos Linear B text V 2, cited by linguist John Chadwick.
In the Olympian pantheon, Athena was remade as the favorite daughter of Zeus, born by parthenogenesis from his forehead. Athena was patron of the art of weaving and other crafts, wisdom and battle. Athena is classically portrayed wearing full armor, carrying a lance and a shield with the head of the gorgon Medusa mounted on it.
Athena competed with Poseidon to be the patron deity of Athens. They agreed that each would give the Athenians one gift and the Athenians would choose whichever gift they preferred. Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a spring sprung up; the water was salty and not very useful, whereas Athena offered them the first domesticated olive tree. The Athenians (or their king, Cecrops) accepted the olive tree and along with it Athena as their patron, for the olive tree brought wood, oil and food.

The Parthenon is the most famous surviving building of Ancient Greece and one of the most famous buildings in the world. The building has stood atop the Acropolis of Athens for nearly 2,500 years and was built to give thanks to Athena, the city’s patron goddess, for the salvation of Athens and Greece in the Persian Wars. The building was officially called the Temple of Athena the Virgin.
The Parthenon replaced an older temple which had been destroyed by the Persians. As well as being a temple, the Parthenon was used as a treasury, and was the location of the treasury of the Delian League, which later became the Athenian Empire.
It was built at the initiative of Pericles, the leading Athenian politician of the 5th century BC. It was built under the general supervision of the sculptor Phidias, who also had charge of the sculptural decoration.

An Athenian trireme was about 35 m long, with a beam of around 5 m. It had a complement of 170 oarsmen, plus a captain, 20 crew, and 10 marines. On each side of the vessel there were 31 thramites (the top row) with oars about 4 m long, 27 zygites (the middle row) with oars about 3 m long and 27 thalamites (the lowest row) with oars about 2 m long. The captain of a trireme was called a trierarch.

The Acropolis of Athens was inhabited from Neolithic times. By 1400 BC Athens had become a powerful centre of the Mycenaean civilisation. Unlike other Mycenaean centres, such as Mycenae and Pylos, Athens was not sacked and abandoned at the time of the Doric invasion of about 1200 BC, and the Athenians always maintained that they were “pure” Ionians with no Doric element. However, Athens lost most of its power and probably dwindled to a small hill fortress once again.
By the 8th century BC Athens had re-emerged, by virtue of its central location in the Greek world, its secure stronghold on the Acropolis and its access to the sea, which gave it a natural advantage over potential rivals such as Thebes and Sparta. Athens was the leading city in Greece during the greatest period of Greek civilization during the 1st millennium BC. During the “Golden Age” of Greece (roughly 500 BC to 300 BC) it was the Western world’s leading cultural and intellectual center, and indeed it is in the ideas and practices of Ancient Athens that what we now call “Western civilization” has its origins.
In 500 BC Athens sent troops to aid the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor, who were rebelling against the Persian Empire. This provoked two Persian invasions of Greece, both of which were defeated under the leadership of the Athenian soldier-statesmen Miltiades and Themistocles (see Persian Wars). In 490 BC the Athenians defeated the first invasion at the Battle of Marathon. In 480 BC the Persians came back, and captured and burned Athens. The Greeks defeated them at the naval Battle of Salamis. Sparta’s hegemony was passing to Athens, and it was Athens that took the war to Asia Minor. These victories enabled it to bring most of the Aegean and many other parts of Greece together in the Delian League, which soon became an Athenian Empire.
The 5th century BC marked the zenith of Athens as a centre of literature, philosophy and the arts. Some of the greatest names of Western cultural and intellectual history lived in Athens during this period: the dramatists Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles, the philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, the poet Simonides and the sculptor Pheidias. The leading statesmen of this period was Pericles, who used the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League to build the Parthenon and other great monuments of classical Athens. The city became, in Pericles’s words, “the school of Hellas.”
Fear of Athenian power and dynamism led to the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, which pitted Athens and her increasingly rebellious empire against a coalition of land-based states led by Sparta and lasted twenty-seven years. The democracy was briefly overthrown in the summer of 411 BC due to its poor handling of the war, but quickly restored. The war ended with the complete defeat of Athens 404 BC. Since the defeat was largely blamed on democratic politicians such as Cleon and Cleophon, there was a brief reaction against democracy, aided by the Spartan army (the Thirty Tyrants). In 403 BC democracy was restored and an amnesty declared. The fact that several traitors to the Athenian democracy were students of Socrates (Charmides, Critias, Alcibiades) has led some to say that his execution was an act of retaliation, but this suggestion has not met with universal approval.