Empires: The Greeks - Crucible of Civilization (2000) s01e02 Episode Script
The Golden Age
490 B.
C.
18 years after the founding of democracy.
Alone figure runs across the mountainous terrain of Greece.
His name is Phidippides, and he is a citizen of Athens.
On this day, Phidippides will make one of the most astonishing athletic achievements in history the inspiration for our modern marathon.
But Phidippides' quest is not for glory, but survival.
His homeland is about to be conquered by the mighty Persian empire.
In the early fifth century B.
C.
the Persians were the greatest power on the world stage.
Their vast empire stretched from India in the east to Turkey in the west.
Now, out on their western frontier the tiny state of democratic Athens was gaining power.
This was a threat that the Persians would have to destroy.
The Persians lived in a culture of unbending tyranny.
At the head of their empire sat Darius known to the Greeks only as "the great king.
" Suppliants had to cover their mouths in his presence just to avoid tainting the air he breathed.
For Phidippides and the democratic Athenians conquest by Darius and the Persians would mean the destruction of their entire way of life.
There is a huge cultural difference between the Greeks and the Persians.
The Greeks are a people who emphasize freedom.
The Persians would put far more emphasis on obedience.
It's a struggle between freedom and slavery.
The Persian force landed at a sandy bay called Marathon, just 26 miles from Athens.
News of the invasion spread through the streets like wildfire.
This was a city without a standing army.
Every male citizen would have to come to the defense of his state.
The poorer citizens have spears, sticks, bows and arrows whatever weapons may can find.
But the heart of the Athenian force would be the hoplites men who could afford heavy bronze armor a shield, a spear, a sword.
The Athenians would field a small but determined force.
That's probably the first time in the history of the Athenian state that the entire population had been mustered and forthem to field 10,000 hoplites out of a citizenry that might have only been 20,000 or 30,000.
It's a level of involvement that's astounding.
But as they faced the Persians on the battlefield the Athenians held out little hope of victory.
They were outnumbered by two to one.
Phidippides' desperate mission was to run for help from one of Athens' local rivals: the Greek state of Sparta.
Even as he ran, Phidippides must have imagined the horror that his fellow Athenians now faced.
You 're dodging spears from your men in front and your men behind and you probably couldn't see or hear.
All you would feel would be pressure.
You wouldn't see the sword plunge that took one of your testicles off.
You would not see the spear thrust that took your head off.
You would have no idea what was going on just the momentum that carried you ahead.
All you would be aware of is that you had to push forward and keep stabbing and keep on your feet and you would hope that everybody else would do that.
Phidippides' run was to become the stuff of legend.
Fired by the terror that his fellow citizens were being slaughtered, he ran 140 miles in just two days.
But Phidippides' quest would end in failure.
Help would be refused.
He was left only with the knowledge that his fellow Athenians would have to fight alone.
Phidippides could never have imagined that the Greeks would in fact win a glorious victory.
The Athenians had rushed at their foe in a headlong charge and the Persians had scattered in the face of their assault.
The Athenians slaughtered over 6,000 Persians in one fateful day.
The world's first democracy had survived its first great test.
Every Athenian knew that he had voted to fight and that this reflected the majority vote of the citizens and that was not true of the Persians.
Whatever you want to say about democracy, it fields the most patriotic, enthusiastic and often large armies.
The Athenians returned to their city to celebrate their victory.
But amongst them was one for what om the war with Persia had only just begun an Athenian general named Themistocles.
Themistocles had fought on the battlefield at Marathon.
He was typical of a new generation of Athenian leaders a man who had risen to power through democracy.
Themistoclesis a fasoinating character, very much an example of the effect of democracy in Athens.
It's relatively clear that he doesn't come from the inner circle of the landed aristocracy that traditionally had ruled in Athens.
There were stories told about his feeling rather touchy about the fact that he hadn't had a traditional aristocratic upbringing for example, in music and poetry.
In fact, that might have given him a spur to show that he could do as well as someone who had gone to all the right schools, as it were.
Themistocles' opinion of his common origins was blunt and straightforward.
"I may not know how to play the lyre or flute, but I do know how to make a city great".
Themistocles had learn the skills of leadership here: the democratic assembly of Athens.
From this very podium, Themistocles would now show himself to be one of history's greatest leaders the savior of his city.
For Themistocles alone recognized that the Persians might still be a danger and that next time victory for the Athenians might not prove so easy.
Themistocles realized that the Persians, if they came again it would be in a way that made sure that they weren't going to be defeated by land again.
There was no way that the Athenians could rely on traditional hoplite fighting technique.
Themistocles began to form a bold new strategy, employing the most advanced weapon of the day The trireme.
Triremes were the state of the art in ancient shipbuilding.
Stacking 170 oarsmen on three levels, their combination of light weight and raw power gave them astonishing speed and maneuverability.
In contemporary terms a trireme is a missile.
The object of a trireme is to ram the enemy's ship.
It is a very narrow, very light, very sleek and very fast weapon.
But these triremes were also exceedingly expensive.
And Themistocles' vision of a vast Athenian navy might never have come to pass if it had not been for one stroke of luck.
In the year 483 B.
C.
, the Athenians discovered a great vein of silver in their territory.
Worth a hundred talents, a vast amount in the ancient world.
The Athenians wanted to divide these new-found rlches among themselves.
But then Themistocles stood up in the assembly.
He wanted to spend the money on ships.
But he also knew that this would be a hard proposal to sell.
And so Themistocles played a complex bluff.
His argument is not that the money should be used to build a fleet against Persia but rather it should be used to build a fleet against Athens' local rival, the Greek city-state of Aegina.
The reason Themistocles does this is that he knew it would simply be too upsetting to remind people of the Persian threat.
It's a difficult argument to make and a tribute to his political skill that he's able to do it.
Themistocles convinced the Athenians to build the greatest naval force in Greece a force of 200 triremes.
And not a moment too soon.
The great Persian king Darius died in 486 B.
C.
and his son, Xerxes, assumed his father's throne.
Xerxes' first action was to vow vengeance for his father's defeat at the hands of the Athenians.
On my father's behalf and on behalf of all my subjects I will not rest until I have taken Athens and burnt it to the ground.
As an imperial power the Persians cannot allow small regional states like this to beat them with impunity.
Xerxes began to gather his forces.
He conscripted troops from every corner of his empire: Arabians, Egyptians, Phoenicians as well as Persians.
Rumors began to leak back to Athens that Xerxes' army numbered nearly two million men that it was the greatest force the world had ever seen that soon it would be ready to march.
And then finally in the spring of 480 B.
C.
news reached Athens.
The Persian army had set out for Greece.
History records that Xerxes' troops drank rivers dry trampled fields to the raw earth ravaging the land as they marched on towards Greece.
Xerxes was confident of victory.
We shall so extend the empire of Persia that its boundaries will be God's own sky so that the sun will not look on any land that is not ours.
When the Greeks realized that the Persians were invading again terror gripped the whole country.
For the Athenians who knew that they would be Xerxes' first target it seemed that this could only be the end.
As panic gripped the city, they turned desperately to their gods.
They sent a messenger to the oracle to find out their fate.
Here, high in the Greek mountains can still be found the site of Delphi the most famous of the Greek oracles.
Built around a vast chasm in the mountain from which a sacred spring still flows.
Here the Greeks would come to discover their future.
They would ask questions of the Pythia, the mysterious priestess who spoke with the voice of the god Apollo.
People came from all over the Greek world to consult Delphi and sometimes came from outside the Greek world as well.
It was considered to be the center of the universe.
The omphalos, the navel stone of the whole world was at Delphi.
People asked questions about their private life which are just the sorts of questions people want answers to now.
Archaeologists have discovered copies of the questions asked of these ancient oracles.
"¿Has Aristos stolen the wool from the mattress?" "Hamion asks, ¿What should I do to have useful children?" But as the Athenians walked up those paths 2,500 years ago their question was simple and grave: what at could they do to save them selves? The oracle's response could not have been more negative.
Why sit you, doomed ones? Fly to the ends of the earth.
All is ruin, for fire and the headlong god of war shall bring you low.
When this message came back to Athens the democratic assembly dissolved into uproar.
It seemed that even the gods had deserted them.
But Themistocles refused to panic.
He had spent every day since the battle of Marathon waiting for this moment.
He sent the envoys back to Delphi for a second prophecy.
Though all else shall be taken Zeus, the all-seeing, grants that the wooden wall only shall not fail.
Argument raged as to what at this wooden wall could be.
Some said it meant the stronghold at the center of Athens, the Acropolis, but Themistocles had a different idea.
He read the oracle and he insisted that it had a different interpretation.
He said the ships are the wooden barricade which are going to be the key to our success.
Themistocles' plan was daring: avoid a conflict on land and fight the Persians at sea.
He ordered the evacuation of Athens for the first time in her history.
This order for evacuation carved into a stone tablet for public display is still preserved discovered in the back of a Greek coffeehouse.
The Athenians shall send their children and wives to the village of Troizen.
All the men should embark on the 200 ships that have been prepared to fight the barbarian.
Themistocles ordered that his fleet of triremes should gather at Salamis a tiny island off the Athenian coast.
Themistocles' strategy is remarkable not only because it is innovative and because it is bold, but because it requires extraordinary self-sacrifice on the part of the Athenian people.
He wants every man, woman and child to leave their homes and possessions and to go into exile.
With Athens abandoned, Xerxes' mighty force entered the city.
The Persians march in and go up on to the Athenian acropolis, the symbol of Athens.
And they burn it.
They burn the temples to the ground.
Then you can see the smoke rising from Salamis.
This would have been a devastating sight and a humiliating one.
They would, in short, have seen their country occupied by a fearsome foreign invader.
Surely they would have wondered if they would ever be able to go home again.
As night fell, Themistocles met the leaders of the other Greek city states on the island of Salamis.
They had also assembled their much smaller fleets here.
Their scouts had reported back.
The Persians now not only held Athens but had also gathered a mighty fleet four times the size of the Greek forces.
But Themistocles' plans were laid.
Themistocles sticks to his guns and his plan is to defeat the Persians at sea.
He wants to fight in this narrow body of water between the island of Salamis and the Athenian mainland.
The trick is going to be to get the enemy to fight there because the Persians aren't stupid.
Themistocles sent his servant to Xerxes with a seemingly traitorous message.
"The Greeks are afraid and are planning to slip away.
They're squabbling with each other and will offer no opposition.
You have at this moment an opportunity of unparalleled success".
So eager was Xerxes for a crushing victory he was happy to believe Themistocles' ploy.
Xerxes marshals his admirals and they embark, and they spend the night rowing.
They send a contingent along the eastern defile, the strait there and they try to block up the straits.
Only as the dawn rose did the Persians realize the true nature of Themistooles' plan.
They discovered the Greeks not in disarray, but ranged in a battle line across the narrows in front of them.
The Persian fleet had been lured so far up the straits that it had no room to maneuver.
Powerful Greek triremes bore down on them without mercy.
The Greek playwright Aeschylus fought in the battle and lived to tell the tale.
We heard from every part this voice of exhortation: "Advance, ye sons of Greece.
From slavery save your country.
Save your wives, your children save.
This day the common cause of all demands your valor".
The Greek forces smashed into the cornered Persian fleet.
Xerxes himself watched the carnage from his golden throne placed on the shore.
At the end of the battle, the Persians had lost 200 ships.
For the Greeks, it was a stunning and conclusive victory.
Victory at Salamis is tremendously important for Greeks and for the Athenians.
It breaks the Persian navy.
The Persians can no longer guarantee that they can feed their army nor can they guarantee the safety of the Persian king.
He must immediately get back to Asia minor while the going is good.
In practical terms the game is over, and the Greeks have won.
Themistocles' triumph was complete.
He had persuaded the Athenians to build a navy.
He had convinced them to sacrifice their en tire city to bring them victory at sea.
His instincts had been proved right.
He had defeated the greatest empire of the day.
And he had now placed Athens in a position where she could build an empire of her own.
After the years of conflict, this was a new dawn for Athens.
The Athenians are going to have naval superiority in the eastern Mediterranean.
And that is how great their victory over the Persian fleet is.
And this has a momentum of its own.
Before you know it the Athenians are the head of the naval confederacy and they're on the road to becoming a super power.
The Athenians founded the Delian League an alliance of Greek states designed to keep the Persians in check.
Its treasury was located here on the island of Delos where the ruins still remain.
By 450 B.
C.
, this league had more than 200 member states but Athens was the undisputed leader.
The Delian league had become Athens' empire in all but name.
And Athens' naval supremacy also gave her economic power.
She became a city at the center of a vast trading network.
Goods from all over the Mediterranean flooded into her harbors.
In its heyday Athens was the Big Apple or, if you will, the Big Olive, of the eastern Mediterranean.
Constant coming and going of traders.
The wharves would be busy full of people in a cacophony of language.
One contemporary author gave an account of the diversity of goods in the Athenian marketplace.
"From Cyrenia, oxen.
From the Hellespont, mackerel and all kinds of salted fish.
Libya provides abundant ivory.
Pagasae provides tattooed slaves; Carthage, rugs and many-colored cushions.
" The Athenian empire was unprecedented in the degree of prosperity that came to it because of its role as a center of trade.
The Athenians had access to a quality of life that probably no Greeks had ever had before.
Athens' rise to economic and political supremacy occurred at lightning speed.
After the battle of Salamis she became the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean in less than a generation.
And at the city's heart still lay her unique system of government: democracy.
A system of voting using pebbles, olive leaves or the show of hands that decided every aspect of the city's government.
Democracy gave the Athenians a great advantage of unleashing talents, powers, opportunities that other cultures simply cannot match.
The Athenians keenly protected their democracy from any threat, foreign or domestic.
Once a year each citizen could scratch the name of an individual onto a shard of pottery, known as an ostraka and place it into a pot in the assembly.
The person whose name came up most would then be ostracized banished from the city.
This was the Athenians' method of protecting their government, expelling any person they felt might become too powerful.
But Athenian democracy could turn on any citizen even its greatest war hero.
Themistocles now found himself under attack.
The threat was gone now.
His raison d'être has been taken away.
This is something he can't understand.
Themistocles reacts perhaps in an uncharacteristically crude way.
He reminded the Athenian voters of what they owed him.
Voters don't want to be reminded, in any period of what they owe to their politicians.
They want to be told what their politicians can do for them.
The Athenian people turned on the aging politician.
Calculated, cruel, but deeply democratic.
They ostracized the man who had led them to their greatest victory.
Themistocles was ostracized I believe, because he was simply regarded as having gotten too big for his boots.
Some of the ostraka with Themistocles' name still inscribed upon them have been found, hidden down an ancient well.
Archaeologists believe that these had been preprepared by Themistooles' enemies to be handed out to Athenian voters who couldn't write.
Themistocles never recovered from this humiliation.
He was to spend the rest of his years wandering from state to state finally dying in exile in Persia the country whaose defeat had been his greatest triumph.
The Athenians were now looking for a leader who might fulfill their newfound sense of imperial glory.
They found a man who seemed the perfect reflection of this new ideal a man who would change the face of Athens forever.
A man named Pericles.
There's probably not a more important figure in the history of classical Greece than Pericles.
He was the leader of Athens at the height of its power and of its artistic achievement.
He was the figure associated appropriately with bringing Athenian democracy to its climax, to its height.
But Pericles was no obvious democrat like Themistocles for he had been born into one of Athens' most elite families.
And perhaps because of his aristocratic origin s Pericles knew what the people of Athens now wanted a city fit to rule an empire.
It seems clear that Pericles had in mind to create a city whose greatness would be admired by the people who lived there by everybody else in the Greek world, well into the future.
Pericles announced a glorious new vision to the Athenian assembly.
All kinds of enterprises should be created which will provide inspiration for every art find employment for every hand.
We must devote ourselves to acquiring things that will be the source of everlasting fame.
Pericles turned his attention to the Acropolis, the sheer peak in the center of Athens home of the city's patron goddess, Athena.
20 years earlier the Persians had burnt down the temples that stood here.
Ever since, the Athenians had left these ruins untouched as a memorial to those killed in the war.
But Pericles had other ideas.
He proposed a massive reconstruction plan.
At its center would be a new Parthenon, a temple to Athena and it would be one of the most astonishing buildings of the ancient world.
This new construction program was of unprecedented magnitude and expense.
The Parthenon in particular was extraordinarily expensive.
It was filled with all sorts of architectural refinements.
Pericles planned to spendover 5,000 talents in the first year alone, a total budget of more than a billion dollars in today's terms.
His project would require 20,000 tons of marble.
The Athenian quarries at mount Pentelicus just outside the city resounded as hundreds of workmen traced out and carved great blocks of marble from the mountain.
This temple would be decorated like none before.
Sculptors and craftsmen were gathered from all over the Greek world.
With them stood Pericles for he treated the building of the Parthenon as his own personal project.
He selected architects he selected the men who designed the plans.
Pericles was directly involved in the planning process.
Some protested that he was decking out the city like a prostitute.
But when the building was completed in only 15 years his critics were silenced.
The Parthenon was and still is the most glorious symbol of Athens' empire.
Here was the spiritual heart of the city the mark of her wealth, power and artistic genius.
When you first came through the door, you'd have been just stunned.
You'd have been confronted immediately by an enormous 40-foot-high statue of Athena in gold and ivory and studded with jewels.
I think the impression of a statue of that size and with that kind of dressing must have truly overwhelming.
Pericles had embellished his temple like no other.
Though this astonishing statue has since been lost to history.
Other treasures from the Parthenon have survived for over 2,000 years.
The most famous is the Parthenon frieze a 500 foot long stretch of carved marble which ran around the inner wall of the temple.
The Parthenon frieze is only 2.
5 inches thick at its maximum depth, and yet in this space the sculptors carved rank upon rank of crowded figures a great procession of Athenians, glorious and elegant.
Here Pericles offered his fellow citizens a vision of themselves and their democratic state at the height of their glory.
Democracy itself becomes heroized in that monument.
It's a very democratic thing that wants to include all those citizens who participated in beating off the first great threat to democracy which was from the Persians.
These are ideals to which you can aspire.
The monuments that Pericles built for his fellow Athenians still stand on the peak of the Acropolis.
They remain the most striking legacy of classical Athens an enduring testament to the achievements of the world's first democracy.
But Pericles was not simply con cerned with astonishing construction projects.
Under his leadership, Athens would also become the intellectual center of the ancient world.
Pericles was remarkable in that he associated with the leading minds of his day in just about every field of endeavor.
In these years Pericles played host to an astonishing generation of individuals.
figures such as Anaxagoras, the first man to realize that the moon was lit by reflected sunlight.
He knew Herodotus, the world's first historian who wrote one of the earliest records of Greek life and poets and authors such as Aeschylus and Euripides whose works are still standards of world literature.
Pericles was well aware of his city's stature.
"Our whole city is an education for our citizens excel all men in versatility, resourcefulness and brilliance".
Even Pericles' partner a woman named Aspasia was unique and distinguished.
Pericles had divorced his wife and set up home with a foreign woman a woman whose occupation was hardly to be expected for Aspasia was what at was known as a hetaira Greek for a "companion.
" Yes, she was in a technical sense, I guess, a prostitute but she was more than that, a woman of ch arm, of style, of intellect.
She really was very extraordinary.
She had an extraordinary mind.
This relation ship caused scandal throughout Athens not just because of Aspasia's profession but because Pericles treated her as an equal something deeply unusual in fifth-century Athens.
One of the things that created such a stir was that Pericles had her participate in conversations that he had with some of the most important individuals with whom he talked.
There's jokes that suggest that Aspasia actually was the person what o wrote Pericles' speeches.
Pericles and his circle were to become one of the most famous and influential groups in Western history.
But in fifth-century Athens the highest achievements of art and culture were not restricted to the elite.
Here in the shadow of the Acropolis sits the world's first theater.
Twice a year the Athenian population would gather here to watch a great festival a festival of drama.
Television, cinema, theater all owe their existence to this place.
For here is the home of popular entertainment.
There's one huge difference between the ancient theater and our own and that is that it was incredibly noisy.
We hear stories of how when they didn't like a play the audience booed and they hissed and they actually got actors driven off the stage.
But there's other stories that showed that when they were going with the story and deeply involved in it they actually all collectively burst into tears.
The favorite tales of the Greek stage were called tragedies.
These were stories as shocking as a contemporary horror movie.
The tragedies told stories of great men falling from their heights, losing everything they owned.
Greek tragedy shows human beings however able, however brilliant, however intelligent quite unable to alter the destinies which have been decreed forthem.
These tragedies have fascinated audiences ever since.
This 19th century painting shows the story of the mythical ruler Agamemnon, who was murdered by his own wife.
Another tragedy told of King Oedipus who gouged out his eyes when he discovered that he had married h is own mother.
These Athenians, natives of the greatest city in the ancient world seemed to revel in seeing how frail greatness could really be.
I don't think we can use Greek tragedy to tell us exactly what happened in reality.
It's not a document of Athenian social life.
But what it does do is take us directly and immediately into the psychological heart of those Athenian men.
The kind of dreams and fantasies and fears and imaginary scenarios that they came up with in the theater have to tell us just as much about them as any document of everyday reality could.
Theaters were built in every major Greek city in Sparta, Corinth, on the island of Delos, here in Delphi.
Athens was the heart of a cultural revolution that would spread across the Mediterranean and echo around the world.
Pericles's Athens seems to me to belong in a smallish collection of cities where truly great moments in the human experience took place.
Culture, in the broadest sense, reaches a peak.
But after 20 years of building the cultural capital of the Western world, Pericles and his fellow Athenians would now find that their theater and their tragedies would hold a bitter sting.
It is possible to think of Pericles, indeed, I think of him.
As a man with atragic flaw as the sort of man whose greatest qualities the ones that make him most admirable and successful turn out to be the seeds of his own destruction.
Pericles began to plan a grand new venture a venture even more ambitious than the Parthenon.
He wanted to make Athens the undisputed leader of the Mediterranean.
Little did Pericles know that he would now bring Athens not glory, but death, destruction and the loss of her empire.
- Created, synced and
C.
18 years after the founding of democracy.
Alone figure runs across the mountainous terrain of Greece.
His name is Phidippides, and he is a citizen of Athens.
On this day, Phidippides will make one of the most astonishing athletic achievements in history the inspiration for our modern marathon.
But Phidippides' quest is not for glory, but survival.
His homeland is about to be conquered by the mighty Persian empire.
In the early fifth century B.
C.
the Persians were the greatest power on the world stage.
Their vast empire stretched from India in the east to Turkey in the west.
Now, out on their western frontier the tiny state of democratic Athens was gaining power.
This was a threat that the Persians would have to destroy.
The Persians lived in a culture of unbending tyranny.
At the head of their empire sat Darius known to the Greeks only as "the great king.
" Suppliants had to cover their mouths in his presence just to avoid tainting the air he breathed.
For Phidippides and the democratic Athenians conquest by Darius and the Persians would mean the destruction of their entire way of life.
There is a huge cultural difference between the Greeks and the Persians.
The Greeks are a people who emphasize freedom.
The Persians would put far more emphasis on obedience.
It's a struggle between freedom and slavery.
The Persian force landed at a sandy bay called Marathon, just 26 miles from Athens.
News of the invasion spread through the streets like wildfire.
This was a city without a standing army.
Every male citizen would have to come to the defense of his state.
The poorer citizens have spears, sticks, bows and arrows whatever weapons may can find.
But the heart of the Athenian force would be the hoplites men who could afford heavy bronze armor a shield, a spear, a sword.
The Athenians would field a small but determined force.
That's probably the first time in the history of the Athenian state that the entire population had been mustered and forthem to field 10,000 hoplites out of a citizenry that might have only been 20,000 or 30,000.
It's a level of involvement that's astounding.
But as they faced the Persians on the battlefield the Athenians held out little hope of victory.
They were outnumbered by two to one.
Phidippides' desperate mission was to run for help from one of Athens' local rivals: the Greek state of Sparta.
Even as he ran, Phidippides must have imagined the horror that his fellow Athenians now faced.
You 're dodging spears from your men in front and your men behind and you probably couldn't see or hear.
All you would feel would be pressure.
You wouldn't see the sword plunge that took one of your testicles off.
You would not see the spear thrust that took your head off.
You would have no idea what was going on just the momentum that carried you ahead.
All you would be aware of is that you had to push forward and keep stabbing and keep on your feet and you would hope that everybody else would do that.
Phidippides' run was to become the stuff of legend.
Fired by the terror that his fellow citizens were being slaughtered, he ran 140 miles in just two days.
But Phidippides' quest would end in failure.
Help would be refused.
He was left only with the knowledge that his fellow Athenians would have to fight alone.
Phidippides could never have imagined that the Greeks would in fact win a glorious victory.
The Athenians had rushed at their foe in a headlong charge and the Persians had scattered in the face of their assault.
The Athenians slaughtered over 6,000 Persians in one fateful day.
The world's first democracy had survived its first great test.
Every Athenian knew that he had voted to fight and that this reflected the majority vote of the citizens and that was not true of the Persians.
Whatever you want to say about democracy, it fields the most patriotic, enthusiastic and often large armies.
The Athenians returned to their city to celebrate their victory.
But amongst them was one for what om the war with Persia had only just begun an Athenian general named Themistocles.
Themistocles had fought on the battlefield at Marathon.
He was typical of a new generation of Athenian leaders a man who had risen to power through democracy.
Themistoclesis a fasoinating character, very much an example of the effect of democracy in Athens.
It's relatively clear that he doesn't come from the inner circle of the landed aristocracy that traditionally had ruled in Athens.
There were stories told about his feeling rather touchy about the fact that he hadn't had a traditional aristocratic upbringing for example, in music and poetry.
In fact, that might have given him a spur to show that he could do as well as someone who had gone to all the right schools, as it were.
Themistocles' opinion of his common origins was blunt and straightforward.
"I may not know how to play the lyre or flute, but I do know how to make a city great".
Themistocles had learn the skills of leadership here: the democratic assembly of Athens.
From this very podium, Themistocles would now show himself to be one of history's greatest leaders the savior of his city.
For Themistocles alone recognized that the Persians might still be a danger and that next time victory for the Athenians might not prove so easy.
Themistocles realized that the Persians, if they came again it would be in a way that made sure that they weren't going to be defeated by land again.
There was no way that the Athenians could rely on traditional hoplite fighting technique.
Themistocles began to form a bold new strategy, employing the most advanced weapon of the day The trireme.
Triremes were the state of the art in ancient shipbuilding.
Stacking 170 oarsmen on three levels, their combination of light weight and raw power gave them astonishing speed and maneuverability.
In contemporary terms a trireme is a missile.
The object of a trireme is to ram the enemy's ship.
It is a very narrow, very light, very sleek and very fast weapon.
But these triremes were also exceedingly expensive.
And Themistocles' vision of a vast Athenian navy might never have come to pass if it had not been for one stroke of luck.
In the year 483 B.
C.
, the Athenians discovered a great vein of silver in their territory.
Worth a hundred talents, a vast amount in the ancient world.
The Athenians wanted to divide these new-found rlches among themselves.
But then Themistocles stood up in the assembly.
He wanted to spend the money on ships.
But he also knew that this would be a hard proposal to sell.
And so Themistocles played a complex bluff.
His argument is not that the money should be used to build a fleet against Persia but rather it should be used to build a fleet against Athens' local rival, the Greek city-state of Aegina.
The reason Themistocles does this is that he knew it would simply be too upsetting to remind people of the Persian threat.
It's a difficult argument to make and a tribute to his political skill that he's able to do it.
Themistocles convinced the Athenians to build the greatest naval force in Greece a force of 200 triremes.
And not a moment too soon.
The great Persian king Darius died in 486 B.
C.
and his son, Xerxes, assumed his father's throne.
Xerxes' first action was to vow vengeance for his father's defeat at the hands of the Athenians.
On my father's behalf and on behalf of all my subjects I will not rest until I have taken Athens and burnt it to the ground.
As an imperial power the Persians cannot allow small regional states like this to beat them with impunity.
Xerxes began to gather his forces.
He conscripted troops from every corner of his empire: Arabians, Egyptians, Phoenicians as well as Persians.
Rumors began to leak back to Athens that Xerxes' army numbered nearly two million men that it was the greatest force the world had ever seen that soon it would be ready to march.
And then finally in the spring of 480 B.
C.
news reached Athens.
The Persian army had set out for Greece.
History records that Xerxes' troops drank rivers dry trampled fields to the raw earth ravaging the land as they marched on towards Greece.
Xerxes was confident of victory.
We shall so extend the empire of Persia that its boundaries will be God's own sky so that the sun will not look on any land that is not ours.
When the Greeks realized that the Persians were invading again terror gripped the whole country.
For the Athenians who knew that they would be Xerxes' first target it seemed that this could only be the end.
As panic gripped the city, they turned desperately to their gods.
They sent a messenger to the oracle to find out their fate.
Here, high in the Greek mountains can still be found the site of Delphi the most famous of the Greek oracles.
Built around a vast chasm in the mountain from which a sacred spring still flows.
Here the Greeks would come to discover their future.
They would ask questions of the Pythia, the mysterious priestess who spoke with the voice of the god Apollo.
People came from all over the Greek world to consult Delphi and sometimes came from outside the Greek world as well.
It was considered to be the center of the universe.
The omphalos, the navel stone of the whole world was at Delphi.
People asked questions about their private life which are just the sorts of questions people want answers to now.
Archaeologists have discovered copies of the questions asked of these ancient oracles.
"¿Has Aristos stolen the wool from the mattress?" "Hamion asks, ¿What should I do to have useful children?" But as the Athenians walked up those paths 2,500 years ago their question was simple and grave: what at could they do to save them selves? The oracle's response could not have been more negative.
Why sit you, doomed ones? Fly to the ends of the earth.
All is ruin, for fire and the headlong god of war shall bring you low.
When this message came back to Athens the democratic assembly dissolved into uproar.
It seemed that even the gods had deserted them.
But Themistocles refused to panic.
He had spent every day since the battle of Marathon waiting for this moment.
He sent the envoys back to Delphi for a second prophecy.
Though all else shall be taken Zeus, the all-seeing, grants that the wooden wall only shall not fail.
Argument raged as to what at this wooden wall could be.
Some said it meant the stronghold at the center of Athens, the Acropolis, but Themistocles had a different idea.
He read the oracle and he insisted that it had a different interpretation.
He said the ships are the wooden barricade which are going to be the key to our success.
Themistocles' plan was daring: avoid a conflict on land and fight the Persians at sea.
He ordered the evacuation of Athens for the first time in her history.
This order for evacuation carved into a stone tablet for public display is still preserved discovered in the back of a Greek coffeehouse.
The Athenians shall send their children and wives to the village of Troizen.
All the men should embark on the 200 ships that have been prepared to fight the barbarian.
Themistocles ordered that his fleet of triremes should gather at Salamis a tiny island off the Athenian coast.
Themistocles' strategy is remarkable not only because it is innovative and because it is bold, but because it requires extraordinary self-sacrifice on the part of the Athenian people.
He wants every man, woman and child to leave their homes and possessions and to go into exile.
With Athens abandoned, Xerxes' mighty force entered the city.
The Persians march in and go up on to the Athenian acropolis, the symbol of Athens.
And they burn it.
They burn the temples to the ground.
Then you can see the smoke rising from Salamis.
This would have been a devastating sight and a humiliating one.
They would, in short, have seen their country occupied by a fearsome foreign invader.
Surely they would have wondered if they would ever be able to go home again.
As night fell, Themistocles met the leaders of the other Greek city states on the island of Salamis.
They had also assembled their much smaller fleets here.
Their scouts had reported back.
The Persians now not only held Athens but had also gathered a mighty fleet four times the size of the Greek forces.
But Themistocles' plans were laid.
Themistocles sticks to his guns and his plan is to defeat the Persians at sea.
He wants to fight in this narrow body of water between the island of Salamis and the Athenian mainland.
The trick is going to be to get the enemy to fight there because the Persians aren't stupid.
Themistocles sent his servant to Xerxes with a seemingly traitorous message.
"The Greeks are afraid and are planning to slip away.
They're squabbling with each other and will offer no opposition.
You have at this moment an opportunity of unparalleled success".
So eager was Xerxes for a crushing victory he was happy to believe Themistocles' ploy.
Xerxes marshals his admirals and they embark, and they spend the night rowing.
They send a contingent along the eastern defile, the strait there and they try to block up the straits.
Only as the dawn rose did the Persians realize the true nature of Themistooles' plan.
They discovered the Greeks not in disarray, but ranged in a battle line across the narrows in front of them.
The Persian fleet had been lured so far up the straits that it had no room to maneuver.
Powerful Greek triremes bore down on them without mercy.
The Greek playwright Aeschylus fought in the battle and lived to tell the tale.
We heard from every part this voice of exhortation: "Advance, ye sons of Greece.
From slavery save your country.
Save your wives, your children save.
This day the common cause of all demands your valor".
The Greek forces smashed into the cornered Persian fleet.
Xerxes himself watched the carnage from his golden throne placed on the shore.
At the end of the battle, the Persians had lost 200 ships.
For the Greeks, it was a stunning and conclusive victory.
Victory at Salamis is tremendously important for Greeks and for the Athenians.
It breaks the Persian navy.
The Persians can no longer guarantee that they can feed their army nor can they guarantee the safety of the Persian king.
He must immediately get back to Asia minor while the going is good.
In practical terms the game is over, and the Greeks have won.
Themistocles' triumph was complete.
He had persuaded the Athenians to build a navy.
He had convinced them to sacrifice their en tire city to bring them victory at sea.
His instincts had been proved right.
He had defeated the greatest empire of the day.
And he had now placed Athens in a position where she could build an empire of her own.
After the years of conflict, this was a new dawn for Athens.
The Athenians are going to have naval superiority in the eastern Mediterranean.
And that is how great their victory over the Persian fleet is.
And this has a momentum of its own.
Before you know it the Athenians are the head of the naval confederacy and they're on the road to becoming a super power.
The Athenians founded the Delian League an alliance of Greek states designed to keep the Persians in check.
Its treasury was located here on the island of Delos where the ruins still remain.
By 450 B.
C.
, this league had more than 200 member states but Athens was the undisputed leader.
The Delian league had become Athens' empire in all but name.
And Athens' naval supremacy also gave her economic power.
She became a city at the center of a vast trading network.
Goods from all over the Mediterranean flooded into her harbors.
In its heyday Athens was the Big Apple or, if you will, the Big Olive, of the eastern Mediterranean.
Constant coming and going of traders.
The wharves would be busy full of people in a cacophony of language.
One contemporary author gave an account of the diversity of goods in the Athenian marketplace.
"From Cyrenia, oxen.
From the Hellespont, mackerel and all kinds of salted fish.
Libya provides abundant ivory.
Pagasae provides tattooed slaves; Carthage, rugs and many-colored cushions.
" The Athenian empire was unprecedented in the degree of prosperity that came to it because of its role as a center of trade.
The Athenians had access to a quality of life that probably no Greeks had ever had before.
Athens' rise to economic and political supremacy occurred at lightning speed.
After the battle of Salamis she became the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean in less than a generation.
And at the city's heart still lay her unique system of government: democracy.
A system of voting using pebbles, olive leaves or the show of hands that decided every aspect of the city's government.
Democracy gave the Athenians a great advantage of unleashing talents, powers, opportunities that other cultures simply cannot match.
The Athenians keenly protected their democracy from any threat, foreign or domestic.
Once a year each citizen could scratch the name of an individual onto a shard of pottery, known as an ostraka and place it into a pot in the assembly.
The person whose name came up most would then be ostracized banished from the city.
This was the Athenians' method of protecting their government, expelling any person they felt might become too powerful.
But Athenian democracy could turn on any citizen even its greatest war hero.
Themistocles now found himself under attack.
The threat was gone now.
His raison d'être has been taken away.
This is something he can't understand.
Themistocles reacts perhaps in an uncharacteristically crude way.
He reminded the Athenian voters of what they owed him.
Voters don't want to be reminded, in any period of what they owe to their politicians.
They want to be told what their politicians can do for them.
The Athenian people turned on the aging politician.
Calculated, cruel, but deeply democratic.
They ostracized the man who had led them to their greatest victory.
Themistocles was ostracized I believe, because he was simply regarded as having gotten too big for his boots.
Some of the ostraka with Themistocles' name still inscribed upon them have been found, hidden down an ancient well.
Archaeologists believe that these had been preprepared by Themistooles' enemies to be handed out to Athenian voters who couldn't write.
Themistocles never recovered from this humiliation.
He was to spend the rest of his years wandering from state to state finally dying in exile in Persia the country whaose defeat had been his greatest triumph.
The Athenians were now looking for a leader who might fulfill their newfound sense of imperial glory.
They found a man who seemed the perfect reflection of this new ideal a man who would change the face of Athens forever.
A man named Pericles.
There's probably not a more important figure in the history of classical Greece than Pericles.
He was the leader of Athens at the height of its power and of its artistic achievement.
He was the figure associated appropriately with bringing Athenian democracy to its climax, to its height.
But Pericles was no obvious democrat like Themistocles for he had been born into one of Athens' most elite families.
And perhaps because of his aristocratic origin s Pericles knew what the people of Athens now wanted a city fit to rule an empire.
It seems clear that Pericles had in mind to create a city whose greatness would be admired by the people who lived there by everybody else in the Greek world, well into the future.
Pericles announced a glorious new vision to the Athenian assembly.
All kinds of enterprises should be created which will provide inspiration for every art find employment for every hand.
We must devote ourselves to acquiring things that will be the source of everlasting fame.
Pericles turned his attention to the Acropolis, the sheer peak in the center of Athens home of the city's patron goddess, Athena.
20 years earlier the Persians had burnt down the temples that stood here.
Ever since, the Athenians had left these ruins untouched as a memorial to those killed in the war.
But Pericles had other ideas.
He proposed a massive reconstruction plan.
At its center would be a new Parthenon, a temple to Athena and it would be one of the most astonishing buildings of the ancient world.
This new construction program was of unprecedented magnitude and expense.
The Parthenon in particular was extraordinarily expensive.
It was filled with all sorts of architectural refinements.
Pericles planned to spendover 5,000 talents in the first year alone, a total budget of more than a billion dollars in today's terms.
His project would require 20,000 tons of marble.
The Athenian quarries at mount Pentelicus just outside the city resounded as hundreds of workmen traced out and carved great blocks of marble from the mountain.
This temple would be decorated like none before.
Sculptors and craftsmen were gathered from all over the Greek world.
With them stood Pericles for he treated the building of the Parthenon as his own personal project.
He selected architects he selected the men who designed the plans.
Pericles was directly involved in the planning process.
Some protested that he was decking out the city like a prostitute.
But when the building was completed in only 15 years his critics were silenced.
The Parthenon was and still is the most glorious symbol of Athens' empire.
Here was the spiritual heart of the city the mark of her wealth, power and artistic genius.
When you first came through the door, you'd have been just stunned.
You'd have been confronted immediately by an enormous 40-foot-high statue of Athena in gold and ivory and studded with jewels.
I think the impression of a statue of that size and with that kind of dressing must have truly overwhelming.
Pericles had embellished his temple like no other.
Though this astonishing statue has since been lost to history.
Other treasures from the Parthenon have survived for over 2,000 years.
The most famous is the Parthenon frieze a 500 foot long stretch of carved marble which ran around the inner wall of the temple.
The Parthenon frieze is only 2.
5 inches thick at its maximum depth, and yet in this space the sculptors carved rank upon rank of crowded figures a great procession of Athenians, glorious and elegant.
Here Pericles offered his fellow citizens a vision of themselves and their democratic state at the height of their glory.
Democracy itself becomes heroized in that monument.
It's a very democratic thing that wants to include all those citizens who participated in beating off the first great threat to democracy which was from the Persians.
These are ideals to which you can aspire.
The monuments that Pericles built for his fellow Athenians still stand on the peak of the Acropolis.
They remain the most striking legacy of classical Athens an enduring testament to the achievements of the world's first democracy.
But Pericles was not simply con cerned with astonishing construction projects.
Under his leadership, Athens would also become the intellectual center of the ancient world.
Pericles was remarkable in that he associated with the leading minds of his day in just about every field of endeavor.
In these years Pericles played host to an astonishing generation of individuals.
figures such as Anaxagoras, the first man to realize that the moon was lit by reflected sunlight.
He knew Herodotus, the world's first historian who wrote one of the earliest records of Greek life and poets and authors such as Aeschylus and Euripides whose works are still standards of world literature.
Pericles was well aware of his city's stature.
"Our whole city is an education for our citizens excel all men in versatility, resourcefulness and brilliance".
Even Pericles' partner a woman named Aspasia was unique and distinguished.
Pericles had divorced his wife and set up home with a foreign woman a woman whose occupation was hardly to be expected for Aspasia was what at was known as a hetaira Greek for a "companion.
" Yes, she was in a technical sense, I guess, a prostitute but she was more than that, a woman of ch arm, of style, of intellect.
She really was very extraordinary.
She had an extraordinary mind.
This relation ship caused scandal throughout Athens not just because of Aspasia's profession but because Pericles treated her as an equal something deeply unusual in fifth-century Athens.
One of the things that created such a stir was that Pericles had her participate in conversations that he had with some of the most important individuals with whom he talked.
There's jokes that suggest that Aspasia actually was the person what o wrote Pericles' speeches.
Pericles and his circle were to become one of the most famous and influential groups in Western history.
But in fifth-century Athens the highest achievements of art and culture were not restricted to the elite.
Here in the shadow of the Acropolis sits the world's first theater.
Twice a year the Athenian population would gather here to watch a great festival a festival of drama.
Television, cinema, theater all owe their existence to this place.
For here is the home of popular entertainment.
There's one huge difference between the ancient theater and our own and that is that it was incredibly noisy.
We hear stories of how when they didn't like a play the audience booed and they hissed and they actually got actors driven off the stage.
But there's other stories that showed that when they were going with the story and deeply involved in it they actually all collectively burst into tears.
The favorite tales of the Greek stage were called tragedies.
These were stories as shocking as a contemporary horror movie.
The tragedies told stories of great men falling from their heights, losing everything they owned.
Greek tragedy shows human beings however able, however brilliant, however intelligent quite unable to alter the destinies which have been decreed forthem.
These tragedies have fascinated audiences ever since.
This 19th century painting shows the story of the mythical ruler Agamemnon, who was murdered by his own wife.
Another tragedy told of King Oedipus who gouged out his eyes when he discovered that he had married h is own mother.
These Athenians, natives of the greatest city in the ancient world seemed to revel in seeing how frail greatness could really be.
I don't think we can use Greek tragedy to tell us exactly what happened in reality.
It's not a document of Athenian social life.
But what it does do is take us directly and immediately into the psychological heart of those Athenian men.
The kind of dreams and fantasies and fears and imaginary scenarios that they came up with in the theater have to tell us just as much about them as any document of everyday reality could.
Theaters were built in every major Greek city in Sparta, Corinth, on the island of Delos, here in Delphi.
Athens was the heart of a cultural revolution that would spread across the Mediterranean and echo around the world.
Pericles's Athens seems to me to belong in a smallish collection of cities where truly great moments in the human experience took place.
Culture, in the broadest sense, reaches a peak.
But after 20 years of building the cultural capital of the Western world, Pericles and his fellow Athenians would now find that their theater and their tragedies would hold a bitter sting.
It is possible to think of Pericles, indeed, I think of him.
As a man with atragic flaw as the sort of man whose greatest qualities the ones that make him most admirable and successful turn out to be the seeds of his own destruction.
Pericles began to plan a grand new venture a venture even more ambitious than the Parthenon.
He wanted to make Athens the undisputed leader of the Mediterranean.
Little did Pericles know that he would now bring Athens not glory, but death, destruction and the loss of her empire.
- Created, synced and