G06: Ancient Greece - Living in the Past: Athens

The city of Athens was the birthplace of Western civilization and is still one of Europe’s great cities. In ancient times it was the most important Greek city-state.

Classical Athens saw the rise of an achievement unparalleled in history. Perikles, Aeschylus, Sophokles, Plato, Demosthenes, Thucydides, and Praxiteles represent just a few of the statesmen and playwrights, historians and artists, philosophers and orators who flourished here during the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., when Athens was the foremost city-state in Greece.

Athens was located on the peninsula and landmass “Attica”. Greece is located around the Mediterranean Sea, Ionian Sea, Aegean Sea, Sea of Marmara, and the Black Sea.

Athens, Greece, with its famous Acropolis, has come to symbolize the whole of the country in the popular imagination, and not without cause. It not only has its iconic ruins and the famous port of Piraeus but, thanks to ancient writers, its history is better documented than most other ancient Greek city-states.

Athens is mostly associated with its ancient past rather than its modern turbulent state of the latest two hundred years. While walking the centre of the luminous city, the visitor can easily observe both ends of Hellenic culture.

The history of Ancient Athens dates back to 6,000 years ago. The first inhabitants of Attica (the wider area of Athens), of who we are aware, lived during the Neolithic Period (6,000-2,800 BC).

The tiny, dirty Greek city-state produced more brilliant minds—from Socrates to Aristotle—than any other place the world before or since. Why?