ATHENS: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age

ATHENS: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age. By Christian Meier. Trans. by Robert and Rita Kimber. Metropolitan. 640 pp. $37.50

The great 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt no doubt had it right: "Conditions in Periclean Athens were such that no sensible and peaceful person of our day would want to live under them." But Burckhardt’s judgment has not kept us from endlessly revisiting the Athens of the fifth century b.c. in our minds. We recognize how much poorer we would be without the ancient Athenians’ intellectual, cultural, and political legacy, the brilliance of which remains undimmed by the darker aspects of the era—the city’s ceaseless belligerence, the limits to enfranchisement (only men could be citizens), the slavery.

The Greek city-states, petty and contentious and cruel, were in seemingly continuous conflict with one another. The mystery, the wonder, is that in this shifting, rocky soil there took root the beginnings of Western democracy. Meier, a professor of ancient history at the University of Munich, sorts out the strands of this astonishing development with clarity and intelligence. He makes it possible for the contemporary reader to return with new confidence to the dense pages of Herodotus and Thucydides and to feel again the lasting power of those formidable first histories.

The notable figures of golden age Athens who crowd Meier’s pages—the for-better-andfor-worse politicians, the vexing sophists and philosophers, the poet-dramatists who interpreted the world for their audiences, the architects and sculptors who dressed the city in physical glory—are all participants in the monumental development that is the author’s principal concern: the progression of Athenian political institutions toward democracy.

Through a process for which the historical documentation is incomplete, there occurred a radical transformation of political thought in Athens at the close of the sixth century b.c. and on into the fifth. The Athenians took control of their destiny and gradually came to identify themselves with the polis and the interests of the polis. The citizens were the city. Athenian democracy grew in accordance with two fundamental principles: first, all decisions were to be made as openly as possible on the basis of public discussion; second, as many citizens as possible were to take part in the political process and hold office.

Meier frames his narrative with two great encounters at sea. In 480 b.c., the Athenians abandoned their city and took to ships for a battle near the island of Salamis with the invading forces of the Persian king Xerxes. The Athenians defeated the Persians and saved Greece, and the stage was set for Athens’s subsequent domination as a naval power in the Aegean. In 416, during the long war with its military rival Sparta, Athens sent a fleet to the island of Sicily to conquer the city of Syracuse. It was a mad enterprise, and the Athenians awoke too late from delusion to defeat and humiliation far from home. Though Athens continued to fight Sparta for another 10 years, until losing the naval battle of Aegospotami in 404, the Sicilian expedition was an emblematic disaster.

The rise and fall of the Athenian empire— in the decades between Salamis and Syracuse—is in the grand tradition of cautionary tales. Meier does not labor to draw lessons about the perils of unrestrained striving for power, but they are everywhere apparent. The city could no longer function democratically once it succumbed to the temptation of irresponsible policies. Not all fifth-century politicians were Pericles, and, in the end, the

Athenians were persuaded by their ambitious leaders to overreach. Athens did not disappear after the fifth century: Plato was not yet 30 years old at century’s end, and Aristotle had not been born. But henceforth, and to this day, the city would matter for the might of its mind.

—James Morris