Athens, Georgia

“ It was not my family, but others, who in former times as well as now, led the people into the worst courses, those same men who sent me into exile. I always acted as leader, not of a party, but of the entire city; thinking it right to uphold that constitution in which Athens had enjoyed her grandeur and freedom, and which I found already existing. [353] For as to democracy, all we Athenians of common sense well knew its real character. ”

“ And altogether the exercise of empire abroad became a prominent feature in Athenian life, and a necessity to Athenian sentiment, not less than democracy at home. Athens was no longer, as she had been once, a single city, with Attica for her territory: she was a capital or imperial city,—a despot city, was the expression used by her enemies, and even sometimes by her own citizens, [14] —with many dependencies attached to her, and bound to follow her orders. ”

“ Under the northern side of the towering rock and around to the east of it runs the thriving city of to-day, thence spreading off for perhaps two miles to the northward along the plain, first closely congested, then widening into more open modernized streets, and finally dwindling into scattered suburbs out in the countryside.
The growth of Athens has left its marks of progress in well-defined strata. The narrow, squalid, slummy streets of the quarter nearest the Acropolis belong to the older or Turkish period of the city’s renascent life. ”

“ Though very remarkable, it seems to me to be one of the most inharmonious ruins in Greece.
The modern Athenians are not very fond of hard exercise, and except in the height of summer, when many of them go to Kephisia and Phalerum, and others to the islands, or to the baths near Corinth for a "cure," they seem well content to remain within their city. They are governed, it seems, by fashion, like those who dwell in less-favored lands. When I was in Athens the weather was usually magnificent and often very hot. ”

“ Besides the water maids and the schoolboys, from the innumerable house doors now opening the respective masters are stepping forth—followed by one, two, or several serving varlets, as many as their wealth affords. All these join in the crowd entering from the country. “Athenian democracy” always implies a goodly amount of hustling and pushing. No wonder the ways are a busy sight!
11. The Streets and House Fronts of Athens.—Progress is slower near the Market Place because of the extreme narrowness of the streets. ”

“ Rampant individualism, seeking personal pleasure, clamorous for the admiration of its fellows, but not restrained from secret falsity by any strong moral sense—that was what the Greeks developed in the end.
Neither must Athens be regarded as a democracy in the modern sense. She was only so by contrast with Persia or with Sparta. Not every man in the beautiful city voted, or enjoyed the riches that flowed into her coffers, and could thus afford, free from pecuniary care, to devote himself to art. ”

“ But honour and wealth alone would not have sufficed for the universal emulation, the universal devotion to all that could adorn or exalt the nation. It was the innovations of Aristides and Ephialtes that breathed into that abstract and cold formality, THE STATE, the breath and vigour of a pervading people, and made the meanest citizen struggle for Athens with that zeal with which an ambitious statesman struggles for himself [290] . These two causes united reveal to us the true secret why Athens obtained a pre-eminence in intellectual grandeur over the rest of Greece. ”

“ Marathon and Eleusis find no place in the great record. The work had already been done, be the name of the doer of it Thêseus or any other, which made Athens all that Athens was—which fused together into one commonwealth the largest extent of territory, the largest number of citizens which, according to Greek political ideas, could act together as members of a single commonwealth. Athens could become all that she did become, because, in an unrecorded age, in an age of which those rude stones at least are the only record, all Attica became Athens. ”

“ With the Athenians philosophy was not a thing apart from the occupations of life and the events of history—it was not the monopoly of a few studious minds, but was cultivated as a fashion by the young and the well-born, the statesman, the poet, the man of pleasure, the votary of ambition 250. It was inseparably interwoven with their manners, their pursuits, their glory, their decay. The history of Athens includes in itself the history of the human mind. ”

“ The Athenian streets, more especially the High Street, present quite another spectacle. At every few yards you find upon the pavement a knot of idlers, concealing their hands in the pockets of their inexpressibles, and alternately settling the affairs of the world, (that is, of the Athens,) and criticising any stranger that passes. Every shop-door too is a sort of rostrum from which the occasional vender of brimstone or blue bonnets, is often found vending Athenian politics to customers of another description ”

“ We tread to-day on venerable ground as we wander amid the shattered pillars upon which Demosthenes and Aristotle gazed, and stand where Plato stood in contemplation. Athens is haunted in every corner with the spirits of mighty philosophers, poets, artists, and statesmen of eternal fame.
The passionate admirer of Grecian civilisation sometimes fails to detect any imperfection in the Athenians of the immemorial epoch. But there were grave faults in the populace of Athens even in the days of its rarest enlightenment.{269} The democracy showed at times the same irrationality then as to-day. ”

“ When he came to be a man the dreadful wars which had ravaged Greece were over, and the destruction of the older structures prepared the way for the rebuilding of Athens. Large quantities of "marble, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony and cypress wood" were there, and a great number of skilful workmen were at hand to work under his command. The Athenians were ablaze with zeal to rebuild the temples and shrines of their gods, who, as they believed, had led them to their victories, and not only the public, but the private means were used to make Athens the grandest and most beautiful city of the world. ”

“ Two other good streets, Athena Street and Æolus Street, traverse this at right angles. The other streets, with the exception of Stadium Street on the N.E., between the chamber of deputies and the University, are generally narrow and winding. Altogether, Athens, like the rest of Greece, is in a condition of increasing prosperity, and reaps the blessings of freedom. It is true that in our own country the ardent philhellenism of forty years ago has cooled down, and Greece is no longer an object of popular and sentimental admiration. ”

“ The two drums of columns in shadow in the foreground reflect the pure blue of the early morning sky. Over their tops may be seen part of the Propylæa, and the mountains of Daphni and Megara.
Athena appears to have been worshipped as a powerful and beneficent deity in many places, but it was at Athens that the more intellectual aspects of her nature were brought into the greatest prominence. How she came to be so closely associated with Athens as to give her name to the city (previously known as “Cecropia”) is a question that is not easily answered. ”

“ The first entrance to Athens will thus bring to a stranger, full of the city’s fame and expectant of meeting objects of beauty at every turn, almost instant disappointment. The narrow, dirty, ill-paved streets are also very crooked. One can readily be lost in a labyrinth of filthy little lanes the moment one quits the few main thoroughfares. High over head, to be sure, the red crags of the Acropolis may be towering, crowned with the red, gold, and white tinted marble of the temples, but all around seems only monotonous squalor. ”

“ Beyond these one meets newer and broader highways, lined in many cases with neat modern shops, called into life by the city’s remarkable growth of the past two decades, which have raised Athens from the rank of a dirty village to a clean and attractive metropolis—in the better sense of that much abused word. ”

“ Athens, become, within a very few years, from the capital of a small province, in fact though not yet in avowed pretension, the head of an empire, exhibited a new and singular phenomenon in politics, a sovereign people; a people, not, as in many other Grecian democracies, sovereign merely of that state which themselves, maintained by slaves, composed, but supreme over other people in subordinate republics, acknowledging a degree of subjection, yet claiming to be free. Under this extraordinary political constitution philosophy and the arts were beginning to make Athens their principal resort. ”

“ To which I would answer, in the true Athenian manner, by asking where the affections of a widowed and childless woman, who has no hope and no chance of being courted by another, are centred. The Athens is a widowed metropolis: she stands registered in the pages of history as having been the seat of kings,—she has her walls of a palace, her name of a royal household, and her gewgaws of a crown and sceptre; but the satisfying, the fattening, the satiating,—or perhaps, as some would call it, the stultifying presence and influence of the monarch is not there ”

“ Upon the retreat of Mar- donius, the Athenians returned to Attica to find their city virtually in ruins. Its fortifications and public buildings had been destroyed or burnt, and the private dwellings had been wantonly defaced or ruined by neglect. Amid the enthusiasm of hope which followed upon the great deliverance of Greece, a natural impulse led the Athenians to rear their city more glorious from its ruins. Themis tocles fanned their patriotism with the foresight of a statesman, and Athens rose again with marvellous rapidity. ”

“ The longer one remains in Athens the more he will be impressed with two things: the one is the perfection of the old art and civilization, and what must have been the vivacious, joyous life of the ancient Athenians, in a climate so vital, when this plain was a garden, and these beautiful hills were clad with forests, and the whispers of the pine answered the murmurs of the sea; the other is the revival of letters and architecture and culture, visible from day to day, in a progress as astonishing as can be seen in any Occidental city. ”

“ Were we so inclined, many and mighty are our prohibitions; first and chiefly, our temples burnt and overthrown, urging us not to alliance, but to revenge. Next, the whole race of Greece has one consanguinity and one tongue, and common are its manners, its altars, and its gods base indeed, if Athenians were of these the betrayers. Lastly, learn now, if ye knew it not before, that, while one Athenian shall survive, Athens allies herself not with Xerxes. ”

“ The Rule of Democracy in Athens.—The Ecclesia, or Public Assembly, of Athens is something more than the chief governmental organ in the state. It is the great leveling engine which makes Athens a true democracy, despite the great differences in wealth between her inhabitants, and the marked social pretensions of “the noble and the good”—the educated classes. At this time Athens is profoundly wedded to her democratic constitution. Founded by Solon and Clisthenes, developed by Themistocles and Pericles, it was temporarily overthrown at the end of the Peloponnesian War ”

“ The Athenians were a totally different people. The leading classes in their commonwealth were cultivated, intellectual, and refined. The city of Athens was renowned for the splendor of its architecture, its temples, its citadels, its statues, and its various public institutions, which in subsequent times made it the great intellectual center of Europe. ”

“ There can be no doubt that the fortification of Piraeus and the transference to it of the port of Athens from the open roadstead of Phalerum constituted one of the most momentous steps in the history of Athens. Coupled with the construction of a large permanent war-fleet it made Athens the first naval power in Greece, and so determined her subsequent history. All three measures originated in the far-seeing mind of Themistocles, who thus in a sense created Athens, and proved himself thereby one of the greatest of statesmen. ”

“ The Persian wars bound all the States together by a powerful Hellenic sentiment of patriotism. The Peloponnesian war dissevered this Panhellenic tie. The disaster at Syracuse was fatal to Athenian supremacy, and even independence. But for this Athens might have remained the great power of Greece. The democratic organization of the government gave great vigor and enterprise to all the ambitious projects of Athens. If Alcibiades had lent his vast talents to the building up of his native State, even then the fortunes of Athens might have been different. ”

“ Following a kind of bridle path, however, we are soon amid the groves of olive and other trees, while the horses plod their slow way beside the brook. Not a few citizens going or coming from Athens meet us, for this is really one of the parks and breathing spaces of the closely built city. The Athenians and Greeks in general live in a land of such natural beauty that they take this loveliness as a matter of course. Very seldom do their poets indulge in deliberate descriptions of “beautiful landscapes”; but none the less the fair things of nature have penetrated deeply into their souls. ”