IV. ATTICA

1. The Background of Athens

The very atmosphere seems different—clean, sharp, and bright; each year here has three hundred sunny days. We are at once reminded of Cicero’s comment on “Athens’ clear air, which is said to have contributed to the keenness of the Attic mind.”²⁶ Rain falls in Attica in autumn and winter, but seldom in summer. Fog and mist are rare. Snow falls about once a year in Athens, four or five times a year on the surrounding mountaintops.²⁷ The summers are hot, though dry and tolerable; and in the lowlands, in ancient days, malarial swamps detracted from the healthiness of the air.²⁸ The soil of Attica is poor; nearly everywhere the basic rock lies close to the surface, and makes agriculture a heartbreaking struggle for the simplest goods of life.* Only adventurous trade, and the patient culture of the olive and the grape, made civilization possible in Attica.

It is all the more surprising that on this arid peninsula so many towns should have appeared. They are everywhere: at every harbor along the coast, in every valley among the hills. An active and enterprising people had settled Attica in or before neolithic days, and had hospitably received and intermarried with Ionians—a mixture of Pelasgo-Mycenaeans and Achaeans^28a—fleeing from Boeotia and the Peloponnesus in the face of the northern migrations and invasions. Here was no conquering alien race exploiting a native population, but a complex Mediterranean stock, of medium stature and dark features, directly inheriting the blood and culture of the old Helladic civilization, proudly conscious of its indigenous quality,²⁹ and excluding from its national sanctuary, the Acropolis, those half-barbarian upstarts, the Dorians.³⁰

Relationships of blood gave them their social organization. Each family belonged to a tribe, whose members claimed the same divine heroic ancestor, worshiped the same deity, joined in the same religious ceremony, had a common archon (governor) and treasurer, owned together certain communal lands, enjoyed among themselves the rights of intermarriage and bequest, accepted obligations of mutual aid, vengeance, and defense, and slept at last in the tribal burial place. Each of the four tribes of Attica was composed of three phratries or brotherhoods, each phratry of thirty clans or gentes (gene), and each clan, as nearly as possible, of thirty heads of families.³¹ This kinship classification of Attic society lent itself not only to military organization and mobilization, but to so clannish an aristocracy of old families that Cleisthenes had to redistribute the tribes before he could establish democracy.

Each town or village was probably in origin the home of a clan, and sometimes took its name from the clan, or from the god or hero whom it worshiped, as in the case of Athens. The traveler entering Attica from eastern Boeotia would come first to Oropus, and receive no very favorable impression; for Oropus was a frontier town, as terrifying to the tourist as any such today. “Oropus,” says Dicaearchus (?) about 300 B.C., “is a nest of hucksters. The greed of the customhouse officials here is unsurpassed, their roguery inveterate and bred in the bone. Most of the people are coarse and truculent in their manners, for they have knocked the decent members of the community on the head.”³² From Oropus southward one moved through a close succession of towns: Rhamnus, Aphidna, Deceleia (a strategic point in the Peloponnesian War), Acharnae (home of Aristophanes’ pugnacious pacifist Dicaeopolis), Marathon, and Brauron—in whose great temple stood that statue of Artemis which Orestes and Iphigenia had brought from the Tauric Chersonese, and where, every four years, as much of Attica as could come joined in the piety and debauchery of the Brauronia, or feast of Artemis.³³ Then Prasiae and Thoricus; then the silver-mining region of Laurium, so vital in the economic and military history of Athens then, at the very point of the peninsula, Sunium, on whose cliffs a lovely temple rose as a guide to mariners and their hopeful offering to the incalculable Poseidon. Then up the western coast (for Attica is half coast, and its very name is from aktike, coastland) past Anaphlystus to the isle of Salamis,* home of Ajax and Euripides; then to Eleusis, sacred to Demeter and her mysteries; and then back to the Piraeus. Into this sheltered port, neglected before Themistocles revealed its possibilities, ships were to bring the goods of all the Mediterranean world for the use and pleasure of Athens. The barrenness of the soil, the nearness of the coast, the abundance of harbors lured the people of Attica into trade; their courage and inventiveness won for them the markets of the Aegean; and out of that commercial empire came the wealth, the power, and the culture of Athens in the Periclean age.