BBC - Building the Ancient City Athens and Rome Episode 1
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00:00Every morning, these soldiers raise the Greek flag above their ancient citadel, the Acropolis
00:15of Athens.
00:21It harks back 2,500 years, to a time when Athens gave birth to the idea of a city run
00:28by free citizens.
00:41Athens is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
00:44And in many ways, it's Athens that gave us our ideal of a city, our ideal of a citizen.
00:52We live in a modern world full of great cities.
00:55Modern Athens is far larger than Athens was in antiquity.
01:00And yet, the Athens of antiquity is an extraordinary achievement.
01:08It wasn't a place where inhabitants were clustered around the palace of a king, but a seat of
01:13open government.
01:16Every aspect of daily life, from defence to waste disposal, was run by its citizens.
01:24Ultimately, this system would define a way of life.
01:37Athenian citizens would give it a name.
01:40They called it people power, demokratia, democracy.
01:50This is the story of how the Greeks transformed the idea of the city into a model which lives
01:56on to this day.
02:00The colonists arrived here and said, this is it, and then we'll build everything around
02:04it.
02:05The grid is coming into view.
02:10How they created an urban way of life.
02:15I love the fact that you know the names of the stonemasons, like the guys who carved
02:21the fluting.
02:24The first constitution that laid down the rights of its citizens and built a city that
02:29was the envy of the world.
02:38The Athenians were fighting for an ideal, and that's the ideal we articulate today.
02:44I'll then travel to Rome, where 500 years later, they created what we could call the
02:49first ancient megacity, complete with high-rise housing.
02:54What I love is that this isn't just a bit of archaeology.
02:57It's a bit of living history.
03:00Underground complexes.
03:09That incredible infrastructure.
03:27There's a famous passage in a guidebook written in the 2nd century AD by a Greek called Pausanias,
03:35and it's a guidebook to all of Greece.
03:37And he comes across a little place in Boeotia called Panopis.
03:43And he says, the city, the polis of Panopis, and then he pauses and says, if you can really
03:50call this place a polis.
03:52And what worries him about Panopis is, and I'll give the quote, it has no magistrates'
04:00no gymnasium, no theatre, no agora, not even a water supply leading to a fountain.
04:10Public space, public buildings, theatres, eventually even public libraries like this
04:15one.
04:17These were the elements which Athenians understood transformed a place of mass habitation into
04:23a true city.
04:26They were taken as given in Athens, which set a benchmark for all ancient Mediterranean
04:31cities and for the cities of today.
04:36These high expectations were the product of a system of government which Athens gave the
04:41world.
04:42A government of the people, by the people, for the people.
04:47And this is how it happened.
04:54Many people think of England's Magna Carta of 1215 as the earliest constitution, but
04:59the document I'm going to show you records one from the 6th century BC, nearly 2,000
05:05years earlier.
05:08The Athenaion Politaria was written by the great Greek thinker Aristotle, yet unlike
05:14the Magna Carta, it's never been filmed before.
05:20Is this it?
05:21Yes.
05:22Oh, wow.
05:24Isn't this fantastic?
05:25I've so often seen pictures of this, but this is the first time I've seen this in the flesh.
05:30It's a papyrus that's, well, it's 2,000 years old, but it's the only surviving copy of Aristotle's
05:38constitution of Athens.
05:41It was discovered back in 1890, it came to the British Museum, and the very, very young
05:48Frederick Kenyon, 27 years old, he set about reading it.
05:53The Greek is incredibly hard to read.
05:56This is just a bit of it.
05:58This is half the papyrus, the full thing would go down to here, it's seven foot in all.
06:03And there were four of those scrolls.
06:07And this initial bit is where he tells the first chapter, which is about the reform of
06:13Solon.
06:15Here, for instance, there's Solon himself, solo in there.
06:23Athenians regarded Solon as the founder of their democracy.
06:28They appointed him their lawgiver, and he was invited to draw up a new legal code to
06:33rescue Athens from bitter internal conflict between rich and poor.
06:39This document was at least as important to the ancient Athenians as the Magna Carta is
06:45for us.
06:46Yet his constitution was far more advanced.
06:55He wasn't just a lawgiver, he was also a poet, defending his reforms.
07:01And here he is saying,
07:04that I freed the land, the black earth, the greatest of the gods,
07:10he calls it, extraordinary expression, the greatest of the gods used to be enslaved.
07:15He gives freedom to the people who work the earth.
07:19And I freed the land of Attica.
07:22Attica, the land of Athens.
07:25It is the longest papyrus text we have of Greek literature.
07:31And that is what changed our understanding of the birth of Greek democracy.
07:39Democratic freedom and the new world of the Greek city went hand in hand.
07:45To understand how radical a departure this was,
07:48you need to see what had gone before.
07:54In the centuries leading up to the Athens of Solon,
07:57there had been large urban settlements in ancient Greece,
08:01just as in China and ancient Egypt,
08:04though none of them were cities as we would understand them.
08:11The most famous flourished in what was once thought to be a world of myth.
08:16This is Mycenae, 75 miles from Athens,
08:20the land of Agamemnon, Helen of Troy and the Trojan War.
08:25The Greeks of the classical period were brought up on the Homeric epics
08:30and their stories of kings of fabulous wealth and power.
08:35It was always assumed that those Homeric epics were mere legend,
08:40fantasies about a heroic age.
08:43That was the assumption until archaeology demonstrated
08:48that there is a historical basis in Mycenaean civilisation.
08:56This, for the world of 3,500 years ago, was a major urban centre.
09:04There were enough homes here to house a significant number of people.
09:10But this was the walled stronghold of a single ruler
09:14rather than a community of citizens.
09:20That's not to say it wasn't advanced.
09:23The huge walls built high over the landscape
09:26were so big that later Greeks thought they were put up
09:29by the one-eyed monsters made famous by Odysseus, the cyclops.
09:36In fact, they were a real feat of engineering.
09:40The highlight was the oldest domed roof in the ancient world.
09:46Yet some of the key ingredients,
09:49associated later with cities like Athens,
09:52shared public amenities, public space and public buildings, were missing.
10:00Ultimately, this was a large settlement with streets and homes
10:04crammed around the great hall, or megeron, of a king.
10:09By 1,000 BC, Mycenae and the other palace centres had collapsed.
10:14Slowly, a new type of Greek settlement was beginning to develop.
10:20In the course of the 9th and 8th centuries BC,
10:23Greeks began to experiment with communities run by the citizens of Mycenae.
10:30In the 9th and 8th centuries BC,
10:34Greeks began to experiment with communities run by the citizens themselves.
10:39This model became known as the polis.
10:45Greek settlers took the polis way beyond the borders of their homeland.
10:50Because when they built their colonies, they were starting from scratch,
10:54they could afford to be even bolder in their thinking.
10:58It became a spectacular experiment in city building.
11:11This beautiful site is known today by its Roman name of Paestum.
11:16But before it was a Roman city, it was a Greek one.
11:20Founded by Greek colonists around 600 BC,
11:24they gave it the name of Poseidonia, Poseidon City.
11:28Now, it may seem a bit weird to look for a Greek city in Italy,
11:34but the south of Italy and Sicily are full of new cities
11:39founded by the Greeks in that period in the 7th, 6th century BC
11:44when they were experimenting with new ideas
11:47of what a city-state, a polis, might be.
11:52And it's maybe in this site, better than anywhere else,
11:56that you can see the elements that go to make up a polis.
12:05To find out what was so revolutionary about the way this place was planned,
12:10I've come here with my colleague from Cambridge, Tiziana D'Angelo.
12:15Tiziana, can you give me an idea of how formal was it
12:19creating a new Greek colony, a new Greek city?
12:24Well, it was a gradual process, but the colonists arrived here
12:28and they had a clear idea of what they needed to build their city.
12:32And they had a set of priorities,
12:34and so they were starting what was the main priority.
12:37The main priority was public space.
12:44Known to Greeks as the agora, this was the leap of imagination
12:48that, more than anything else,
12:50differentiated the new Greek settlements from Mycenae.
12:54At the heart of the polis was not a palace for a king,
12:58but an open meeting space for the citizens.
13:03We are basically entering the southern border of the agora,
13:07and the agora was huge, so it extended there for 10 hectares.
13:11Wow, so not just this, 10 hectares is absolutely gigantic.
13:16So public space is really important in the city.
13:20It was the first thing that they were very concerned about.
13:24So they arrived here and they sort of saved this large square
13:27and they said, OK, this is it, and then we'll build everything around it.
13:31So this is for the demos, this is for the people,
13:35and then individuals can have their houses further away.
13:39Yes, west and east of the agora, but we don't touch this space.
13:48In total, the public space here, including the sanctuaries,
13:52was the equivalent of nearly eight football pitches.
13:55That's a quarter of the town's surface area.
13:59The agora of the polis put the inhabitants
14:02at the centre of a new kind of settlement,
14:05one run by the citizens themselves.
14:08The city as we begin to know it.
14:18It was here that the citizens, the politai,
14:21met to discuss the future of the city.
14:24It was here that the citizens, the politai,
14:27met to exchange goods and ideas, to buy and sell,
14:31also just to talk to each other.
14:34Agora comes from the Greek word for to talk, agriuo.
14:39The idea of public space as a place to talk may seem innocuous,
14:44but out of talk came political discussion,
14:48and out of political discussion came politics.
14:55The agora and the approach to politics that came with it
14:59became as popular on the Hellenic mainland
15:02as it did in colonies like Poseidonia or Paestum.
15:06In 900 BC, there hadn't been a single polis in Greece.
15:11By 600 BC, there were hundreds.
15:16At the time when Paestum was established,
15:19Athens was just another polis in central Greece,
15:22but it was developing fast.
15:24Above all, its agora began to evolve,
15:27not just in size but also in role.
15:32Just after 600 BC, politics in the agora was revolutionised.
15:40The agent of change was the reform of government by Solon,
15:44described by Aristotle.
15:47What you saw in the British Library is only a section of the Polytaia.
15:52An entire scroll like this copy I put together was even longer.
15:57Laid end-to-end, the complete text is a staggering 5.7 metres,
16:03nearly 20 feet long.
16:06It tells us in detail not only about Solon's reforms,
16:10but also what life was like in Athens before he arrived.
16:16MUSIC PLAYS
16:22It says, all the land was in the hands of the rich
16:26and the poor women, children were effectively their slaves.
16:31And then it talks about how Solon had his great revolution,
16:37his sesachtheia, his shaking up of everything.
16:41And here we have Solon talking about
16:44how he gives freedom to the people of Attica.
16:47He liberates them from shameful slavery,
16:51dulien aetia, and makes them free citizens.
16:57The laws say no-one who is born in Attica can be turned into a slave.
17:03There's no more slavery for debt.
17:06And the Constitution then gives them political rights.
17:11And without that, there is no such thing as democracy.
17:15Solon, back in 594 BC,
17:18legislated the instrument to create freedom and democracy.
17:27He gave them an ecclesia, an assembly,
17:30where they had a vote and where they had the freedom to speak.
17:36That freedom of speech is fundamental for democracy.
17:43Solon's reforms weren't perfect.
17:46They excluded women and foreign slaves from citizenship.
17:52But they launched the idea of people power,
17:55which came to its peak in 5th century Athens
17:58as male citizens voted on almost every decision.
18:02These were thrashed out in sight of the Acropolis
18:06at the heart of Athenian democracy, on the hill of the Pnyx.
18:12One of those who knows best how this place worked
18:15is my old friend John Papadopoulos,
18:18who has been studying here for 30 years.
18:22We get a great view of the Acropolis from this spot, don't we?
18:26And I guess down there we've got the Agora,
18:30and that's where so much of democracy happens.
18:34And yet this is an even more important spot for democracy, isn't it?
18:39This is the iconic spot.
18:41This is where the assembly of male citizens
18:44that constitute the Athenian democracy,
18:47this is where they met,
18:49this is where they made all of their decisions.
18:52And it's just here that we have the orators' platform.
18:58And this is very important. This is where the orators stood.
19:02And in order to make your voice heard,
19:06you had to shout above a quorum of a minimum of 6,000 citizens.
19:136,000 is an enormous number.
19:16You're filling this entire space, aren't you?
19:20And they sent people down into the Agora with ropes,
19:25literally to rope them in.
19:27They had red paint on the ropes
19:29so you could see who was, you know, loitering around.
19:33You fill the place till it's full by definition.
19:37You've got a lot of poor people there.
19:39You couldn't ignore the will of the poorest people in the society.
19:44And that is, of course, one major reason why the democracy expanded.
19:51And over time, it didn't just expand in Athens, but across the world.
19:56Do you think the numbers we have in Barnet and Camden are adequate?
20:00You've got more police on the street.
20:02Straightforward question. Answer the question.
20:04Yes. Answer the question.
20:06Ask a sensible question, Dumbo. Yes.
20:08Oh, here we go again.
20:10Water. Here we go again.
20:12Democracy is alive and well in modern cities today.
20:15And one place that's proud to have inherited the mantle is London.
20:20Yes or no, did you say it was going to be free?
20:23I urge you to get up on the cable car...
20:25I've been on the cable car, Mr Mayor, but I...
20:29It's a system where politicians have to take the rough with the smooth.
20:34Ancient Athens' greatest champion in this capital,
20:37Boris Johnson, is no exception.
20:40But the Athenians would have considered
20:42this version of democracy tame by comparison.
20:47The citizens delegated little to their politicians
20:50and had the right to do more than just vote them from power.
21:02I want you to imagine you're in the Pnyx,
21:05that you're an octopus.
21:07You're in the Pnyx, that you're an orator on the Beamer.
21:11You haven't got a mic at all. I know.
21:13What would it have been like?
21:15It would have been very difficult.
21:17And, of course, the Athenians had the inexpressible pleasure
21:21of being able, when they were fed up with people,
21:24to vote to ostracise them.
21:26Can you imagine the impact on you as the humble person of Athens?
21:31You're never going to be one of these guys,
21:33but you can send them to Bulgaria or wherever
21:36for a long time.
21:37And it must have been a fantastically powerful thing.
21:40I think we should bring it back.
21:42I'm not going to say anything in comment on that.
21:49But none of this was a joke to the ancient Athenians.
21:52They didn't just have the right to expel those
21:55who threatened their democracy.
22:02So, what's going on here?
22:04We've got a stelae, a long piece of marble
22:08with a long inscription down the bottom
22:10and then an image up above of a woman crowning a seated man.
22:16Well, it's a celebration of democracy.
22:20What we see here is a woman,
22:23who was the personification of democracy,
22:27crowning a seated gentleman
22:30who is a representation of the demons, of the people.
22:34So we have the story both in image and in word.
22:40The long inscription, it says that anyone
22:45who attempts to overthrow the democracy,
22:49anybody who wants may murder them.
22:52They may kill them with impunity and there will be no prosecution.
23:01Athens guarded its democratic status with pride.
23:09Even in today's Athens, you can still find clues
23:12to how the visionary government created by ancient Athenians
23:16took the lead over its rivals.
23:19Kalimera. How are you? Good morning.
23:21Good morning. Good morning.
23:23Do you have ancient coins?
23:25Yes, we have, yeah.
23:27Oh, terrific. Oh, brilliant, brilliant.
23:30And here, how much?
23:32Two euro. Two euro? Yes.
23:34You've made me a happy man.
23:36I have to say, I really am pleased to have my own Athenian owl here.
23:41Two euros is a small price to pay for this beauty.
23:44Of course, it's not an original Athenian owl, it's just a modern copy.
23:48But, symbolically, this is what the wealth of Athens was all about.
23:54They made these coins, which they always stamped
23:57with the owl of Athena, the goddess of wisdom,
24:00with the silver from the mines at Laurium.
24:03And it's the lucky strike of one particular year, 493 BC,
24:08when the state makes a profit of 100 talents.
24:13What to do with this?
24:15Their first idea, split it up between the citizens of Athens.
24:19It would have worked out at ten drachma a head.
24:22And the great politician Themistocles says,
24:25no, no, no, invest, invest, invest.
24:28With those 100 talents, we can build 100 ships.
24:34Themistocles was a statesman
24:36of Churchillian importance in democratic Athens.
24:40He realised he had to persuade his citizens
24:43of the need to build up the navy,
24:45to defend both the Athenian democracy and its strategic interests.
24:51Like Churchill, Themistocles was a great orator.
24:55It was no small feat to get the Athenian voters
24:58to forego a cash handout and invest instead in naval power.
25:06Control of the sea and the trade brought with it
25:10would stimulate the growth
25:12of the most populated city in the Mediterranean.
25:16This is a replica trireme, or Athenian battleship.
25:21Its design is based on original stone carvings.
25:25It's 35 metres long, with three banks of oars.
25:30This was the pinnacle of naval technology in its day.
25:36With 170 oarsmen, a ship like this needed to outmanoeuvre the enemy.
25:45It required a high degree of training and skill
25:49to achieve the synchronisation of all the rowers.
25:53They could complete a full turn of the boat in fewer than 70 metres.
25:58That's only two ship lengths.
26:02Its battering ram was its lethal weapon,
26:05as the ship's current honorary commander,
26:08Captain Panos of the modern Greek navy, explains.
26:13They used all the oarsmen during the battles
26:16in order to give strength when the ram was hitting the other vessels.
26:22So the ram is a really important part of the ship.
26:26This is the true weapon of the ship, isn't it?
26:30Correct.
26:31And what you want to do is get up the maximum speed
26:34so that that bronze ram goes right into the side.
26:38Correct.
26:39The oarsmen, they were free men,
26:42something that a lot of people don't know.
26:45Because, of course, historically,
26:48rowing ships have often been rowed by slaves,
26:51often chained to the oars.
26:53It was a brutal and horrible thing to do,
26:56and it must have been actually quite unpleasant,
26:59rowing in a ship like this.
27:01It was unpleasant, but the fact that those men were free citizens,
27:05they were not slaves, and that's why they gave their best.
27:11The Athenian navy, the future growth of the city of Athens
27:15and the freedom of its citizens became inextricably linked.
27:21The investment of the profits of the silver mines at Lorien
27:25in building up a new navy
27:27had enormous consequences for the development of Athens.
27:32On the one hand, it made Athens a great naval power
27:36and led to victories,
27:38but it also had deep political implications.
27:42The people who pulled the oars were Athenian citizens,
27:46but, above all, they were the poor citizens of Athens,
27:50and that meant that their voice really mattered in politics.
27:55They voted to send themselves into battle.
28:01In 480 BC, Persia invaded Greece.
28:07Now, the ability of a citizen state to stand up to a great empire
28:12would be put to the test.
28:19Their Athenian leader decided to take a huge risk.
28:23An oracle had told the Athenians to trust in their wooden walls.
28:29Themistocles interpreted this to be the Athenian navy.
28:34Instead of defending the city with soldiers,
28:37he would instead abandon Athens
28:39and withdraw his troops to ships moored off Salamis.
28:46According to the Greek historian Herodotus,
28:49the Persians outnumbered the Greeks by more than four to one.
28:54But as night fell, the master tactician Themistocles
28:58sent messages to the Persians,
29:00hinting that he was ready to change sides.
29:05The Persians, in order to maintain their position
29:08as negotiations continued through the night,
29:11were forced to back-paddle.
29:13As dawn broke, and with the Persians exhausted,
29:17Themistocles attacked, annihilating him.
29:24Though Athens itself had been razed to the ground
29:28and the old Acropolis destroyed,
29:30the Athenian people and their revolutionary system of government
29:34had triumphed in war.
29:40They were now in a position to win the peace
29:43and transform their home from just another Greek polis
29:47to the most glittering city in the ancient world.
29:54To understand Salamis as a turning point,
29:57you need to see the landscape from the top of the Hill of the Muses.
30:06So, we're looking out here
30:09on the heart of Athenian naval power, aren't we?
30:12Oh, this is the most magic spot for Athenian history and topography.
30:17Right in front of us, we have that crescent moon-shaped harbour,
30:22and that is Phaleron.
30:24And it was there that the harbour was during the Battle of Salamis.
30:28But because Phaleron was too open and too exposed,
30:33at or shortly after 480,
30:36under the inspired leadership of Themistocles,
30:39in order to protect the harbour,
30:42decided to move the main harbour from Phaleron
30:46to the three different harbours of Piraeus.
30:50And there's that one modern skyscraper in the middle,
30:53one harbour is to the left of that,
30:56one harbour is more or less there,
30:58and the main harbour, Cantharos, is to the right.
31:05The wooden walls of Athens, its legendary fleet,
31:08were now reinforced by these famous long walls,
31:12formidable fortifications of stone,
31:1520m high and 6km in length.
31:20They effectively enclosed the route from Athens to Phaleron and the Piraeus,
31:25protecting the link to the sea
31:27and the future greatness of democratic Athens as a maritime power.
31:33They transformed Athens into a city of unprecedented size,
31:38integrated with a system of ports that made it the trading hub of the Aegean.
31:51The modern Piraeus is an enormous ferry port,
31:54but it's in exactly the position of the ancient Piraeus,
31:58and it's this gigantic port that is the secret
32:01of the commercial success of ancient Athens.
32:07With its hard-won political freedom came economic freedom.
32:11Athens' naval power meant the Athenian merchant fleet was free to trade
32:16with whoever they wished,
32:18bringing in vast wealth and goods from all over the Mediterranean and beyond.
32:30Parts of the ancient sea fortifications of Athens survive today.
32:39And more remarkable still, an archaeological team
32:42from the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities
32:45and the Danish Institute at Athens has discovered one key element
32:49of the city's supreme maritime status in the 5th century BC,
32:54the foundations of the shipsheds in Zea harbour.
33:00What we have here is an artistic reconstruction of the Zea harbour,
33:05and this is exactly the point that we are standing right now.
33:10And this is one of the two fortification towers
33:14that would block the entrance of the harbour.
33:16So right here, going across the mouth of the harbour?
33:19Exactly, right.
33:21One tower would have been here, the other one on the other side,
33:24and by using a chain, they would block the entrance,
33:28because they wouldn't like anybody coming in
33:31and having access in their triremes.
33:33This harbour complex would have been almost 110,000 square feet.
33:39You'd have space for 196 shipsheds.
33:48Themistocles didn't just inspire a great navy,
33:51he also persuaded the citizens to begin a public infrastructure project
33:56which was without parallel in the ancient world.
34:02When Themistocles developed this area
34:04and created his new system of ports,
34:07he built a great wall around it, linked it up to the Acropolis.
34:12You can see the trace of the long walls,
34:14which are followed by modern streets.
34:17But he also created a residential quarter,
34:21and he brought in a famous architect,
34:24a certain Hippodamus of Miletus,
34:27to lay out this new residential quarter for him.
34:31Hippodamus was famous for his radical ideas
34:34about how people should live in his new cities.
34:39Sometimes regarded as the father of modern town planning,
34:43he disliked the confusion of the older settlements of antiquity
34:47and sought to impose a new order in the planning of Greece.
34:53His was a utopian vision and a democratic one.
34:57In modern Athens, it's hard to get a feel
34:59of what Hippodamus' city would have looked like.
35:05However, there is one place you can really get the idea.
35:10In northern Greece, 125 miles from the Bulgarian border,
35:14are the remains of the ancient city of Olynthos.
35:18It's the best surviving example
35:20of the layout of a Greek city of the Classical period.
35:24At the south of the site, there's an earlier development
35:27from the 6th century BC,
35:29with clusters of houses strewn here and there.
35:35Then, in the 430s BC,
35:37we can see the scale of the revolution that took place.
35:46The new settlement is laid out with pin-point buildings,
35:51the new settlement is laid out with pin-point mathematical precision,
35:56long straight streets dividing equally sized blocks.
36:02In each are ten houses, all of them of the same dimensions.
36:11The clear boundaries of the grid
36:13helped avoid disputes between neighbours,
36:16because this was a society where the law reigned supreme
36:19and the equal-sized houses symbolised the equality between citizens.
36:30Themistocles' development of the Piraeus after the Battle of Salamis
36:34had created not only a mechanism for economic expansion,
36:38but also one which would energise the young democracy.
36:44The grid at Piraeus stretched out towards the old town
36:47and Athens was entering a new phase,
36:50the Golden Age of the city.
36:59The key to success was an alliance of cities,
37:02each of them unique and diverse, with Athens at the helm.
37:07Athens' victory over the Persians led to an explosion of growth.
37:12The Persians may have been defeated,
37:14but they were still a real menace to the Greeks.
37:17And what Athens does is to form an alliance
37:19of all the cities threatened by the Persians.
37:22A couple of hundred cities sign up to a great naval alliance.
37:28The Athenians led the alliance,
37:30but they also set it up in a way that proved very advantageous to themselves.
37:35They said to their allies,
37:37well, either you provide ships to add to our navy or you give us cash.
37:42And progressively, as the cash came in, the navy got bigger and stronger
37:47and it became harder and harder for the other allies
37:51to do anything but play tribute to Athens.
37:55By 460, the Persians had been driven right out of the Aegean.
38:01There wasn't a single Greek city left threatened by the Persians.
38:06And at that point, it becomes slightly less important
38:10for the Athenians to put their navy out
38:12and they find other ways of spending their money.
38:17The city of Athens flourishes on its naval victory and naval power.
38:26Almost immediately, they start building
38:29and the Acropolis is built on the profits coming in
38:33from this great naval alliance.
38:40The city was now free to make real its urban ideal.
38:45And in the 440s BC, under its new and dynamic leader Pericles,
38:50this lavish building programme began in earnest.
38:56Although he was born into a noble family,
38:59Pericles was a populist
39:01who would take Athenian democracy into an even more radical direction.
39:06Under his leadership, the poor would not only be allowed to sit on juries,
39:11but be paid handsomely for it.
39:14He even introduced subsidies to enable them to attend the theatre.
39:26The monuments on the Acropolis were designed to make ordinary Athenians
39:30feel proud of the achievements of their grassroots democracy.
39:37Although the Parthenon is the most famous of those buildings,
39:41by looking a little closer,
39:43you can decipher the clues left by the ancient Athenians themselves
39:47about what they thought had made their city great.
39:52It's interesting, isn't it, how all these tourists come flooding through
39:56and they've got eyes only for the Parthenon.
40:00They all know that this is the monument to see on the Acropolis.
40:04And they don't even pause to look at this one down here.
40:09The Propylaea may seem just an entrance to the Acropolis,
40:13but John has a striking new theory.
40:16If he's right, the tourists are missing something monumental.
40:20What's really remarkable, and this has been an enigma for a long time,
40:26was why did the architect Mnesicles in 437 BC
40:31change the orientation by almost 40 degrees?
40:35Well, out that-a-way.
40:37Out there.
40:38It used to point out towards the Hill of the Muses and towards Phaleron.
40:42Yeah.
40:43Whereas now he changed it,
40:45and nobody could quite figure out what that was all about.
40:49It's so elegantly simple,
40:51and it typifies what the Athenians were all about.
40:55Upon exiting the Acropolis,
40:58upon exiting the Propylaea,
41:01Salamis is in your face.
41:04Mnesicles captured for eternity
41:08the watershed event that defined Athens.
41:17Elsewhere on the Acropolis,
41:19there are the signs of the human story behind these monuments.
41:23They reveal the spirit of openness,
41:25which would make Athens the centre of the Mediterranean world.
41:29Of course, the big names involved in putting up these wonderful temples,
41:33people like Pheidias or Mnesicles,
41:37they were probably Athenian citizens.
41:40But what about the workmen who did all the detailed work?
41:44Well, this is, in fact, very interesting
41:46because we actually have inscriptions
41:49that give account a list of all the workmen
41:53and what exactly they did.
41:58This amazing historical document,
42:00now on display in the Acropolis Museum,
42:03lists the names of all the workmen who built the Erechtheion,
42:07giving their jobs, their place of origin,
42:10and, in many cases, even their social status.
42:13I love the fact that you know the names
42:16of each and every carpenter who worked here,
42:19the stonemasons, like the guys who carved the fluting.
42:23It's quite specific, not who made the columns,
42:26but who did the little channels down.
42:28And there's this guy called Simeas,
42:30who has a group of four slaves,
42:32and they were working explicitly on the fourth column,
42:35which must be one, two, three, four.
42:37That's Simeas at work. Brilliant fluting.
42:41Look at the Erechtheion,
42:43one of the great buildings of ancient Athens.
42:45Of the 86 builders, sculptors of the Erechtheion,
42:48who we've identified,
42:5040 were metics, resident aliens.
42:53I think 26 were slaves and the rest of them were freeborn.
42:58In other words, the overwhelming majority were either slaves
43:02or, in the great, biggest categories,
43:04slaves who had been enslaved.
43:06The overwhelming majority were either slaves
43:09or, in the great, biggest category, were foreigners.
43:12It was built by the Poles, as it were.
43:14It was built by the immigrant labour
43:16from what was then the equivalent of Albania,
43:19or wherever it happened to be.
43:25What the Erechtheion documents
43:27is a willingness to welcome energy and talent
43:30if it could be turned to the advantage of the city as a whole.
43:34It was an openness that went hand in hand with democracy.
43:43As the prosperity of the Piraeus with its metic traders grew,
43:47so the road system was transformed
43:50to accommodate the rising number of goods
43:52needed to supply the increasing population.
43:58It's no accident that the modern railway link
44:01from the old Agora to Piraeus today
44:03traces the road linking Athens to the port in ancient times.
44:08The technology has changed,
44:10but the infrastructure blueprint
44:12laid down by 5th-century Athenians remains the same.
44:17The new transport links meant that then as now,
44:21Athenians could buy from an international shopping list in the Agora.
44:28An open city meant global trade,
44:31as Pericles boasted in the 5th century BC.
44:36Because of the importance of our city,
44:39the products of the whole world flow in here,
44:42and it is our good fortune to enjoy with the same familiar pleasure
44:46both our home-produced goods and those of other people.
44:54But we know from contemporary descriptions
44:57just how rich the Agora was
45:00and just what a wide range of goods you could buy there.
45:03There's a lovely passage here that I'm going to quote you
45:06from a comic poet,
45:09and he says you can buy pretty well anything in Athens.
45:14It comes from all over the world.
45:16Then Syracuse gives us cheese and well-fed pigs.
45:21Sales come from Egypt, and this paper too.
45:24Incense from Syria.
45:27In Paphlagonia grows the almond grove.
45:30The elephant sends its teeth from Africa's sands.
45:33Phoenicia sends us dates across the billows.
45:37And Carthage, carpets rich and well-stuffed pillows.
45:45With so much trade going on in and around the city,
45:49the Athenian government imposed a strict system of weights and measures
45:53to ensure that no-one got cheated buying the city's produce.
46:00In a democracy, the rule of law mattered,
46:03and public officials were appointed
46:05to ensure that all aspects of daily life
46:08were managed freely, fairly and cleanly.
46:14So this drain, John, is this an original feature?
46:17Oh, very much so.
46:19This is actually one of the most important parts of the agora.
46:23This is the great drain.
46:25In order for the agora to become an agora,
46:29you had to have water management.
46:33Fountains brought drinking water into Athens.
46:37The great drain channelled the excess out,
46:40preventing flooding and removing waste.
46:44So the Athenians really cared about keeping their city clean,
46:48and it's not just having drains,
46:50but of course they have a board of officials who are responsible for it.
46:54Oh, yes, indeed. The so-called asti nomoi.
46:57And these were the people responsible for keeping the city clean,
47:01and asti, the first part of the word, is the word for the city,
47:06nomoi being rules, laws, etc.
47:10So these were the people who kept the drains flowing,
47:13who kept the city clean,
47:15but they were also responsible for the koproforoi.
47:19The koproforoi would mean literally shit carriers.
47:23Exactly.
47:24And there are very clear prescribed rules and regulations
47:29as to where and how far from the city walls
47:33you could take the human waste.
47:35It's all part and parcel of managing this great city.
47:39That's wonderful. The city of hygiene.
47:42The city of hygiene.
47:46MUSIC
47:49The democratic government of Athens
47:51had done more than create the institutions
47:54which could make a great city work.
47:56It had set the benchmark of what a polis in Greece should be.
48:03And that standard had been set by public demand,
48:07the power of the people, democracy.
48:10It was a standard not just for ancient Athens,
48:13but for the cities of the future.
48:17Summed up by one of the greatest Athenian leaders, Pericles,
48:21his words continue to inspire our leaders of today.
48:27A spirit of freedom governs our conduct,
48:30not only in public affairs,
48:32but also in managing the small tensions of everyday life,
48:35where we show no animosity at our neighbours' choice of pleasures,
48:40nor cast aspersions that may hurt even if they do not harm.
48:45Now, that is what we're all about.
48:47That's London.
48:48That's the idea that you let people get on with their lives,
48:51that you don't have any prejudices
48:53on grounds of race or gender or sexuality or whatever,
48:56and you welcome and you tolerate.
48:58And that's what they believed in,
49:00and that's the ideal we articulate today.
49:04And it was that tolerance that led, arguably,
49:07to Athens' greatest legacy.
49:10For Athens, political freedom and freedom of trade went hand in hand.
49:15But Pericles understood, for a city really to take off,
49:19it needed ideas, freedom of thought.
49:23This is the modern Academy of Athens,
49:26but it recalls the great philosophical schools of ancient Athens,
49:31like Plato's Academy.
49:33Athens' spirit of freedom meant that it became a magnet
49:36for the greatest thinkers in the known world,
49:39following the lead of Socrates and Plato.
49:44And indeed, it was Plato's star pupil, Aristotle,
49:47who recorded the Constitution of Athens, its Politeia,
49:51the document which has given us our unique insight
49:55into the workings of ancient Athens.
49:59It was Solon's Law Code which had drawn the link
50:02between freedom and the city
50:04and established the rights of citizens for the first time.
50:10And just how unique Athens was would quickly become apparent
50:15because success brought rivalry.
50:21As the Persian threat subsided,
50:23there was a protracted series of wars with another Greek state,
50:28Sparta.
50:32These wonderful pieces are copies of sculptures
50:35from the Acropolis in Athens.
50:37Athens was full of sculptures, images, works of art, monuments.
50:42That's what Athens was about.
50:44Here we've got the tyrant slayers,
50:47Harmodius and Aristocratus.
50:49The originals stood in the agora as symbols of democracy.
50:53These were the people who drove out tyrants.
50:57By contrast, Sparta is an almost image-free zone.
51:02One of the rare exceptions is this guy here,
51:05who's supposed to be the Spartan king, Leonidas,
51:09the king who commanded the 300
51:11who met their death at the gates of Thermopylae.
51:16Sparta was in so many ways the polar opposite of Athens.
51:20It was the opposite of all the ideals which Solon stood for,
51:24that idea that if you were born in the territory,
51:27you should always be free.
51:29In Sparta, by contrast, there was a whole population of serfs,
51:33they called them helots,
51:35who were, generation after generation,
51:37bound to work for the land-holding elite,
51:40the Spartiates, like Leonidas.
51:43They had no laws, no coinage, not very fond of trade.
51:48They didn't really like immigrants.
51:50In fact, once a year, they ritually drove out all foreigners.
51:55It was called the xenelasia, the driving out of foreigners.
51:59And as a consequence,
52:01Sparta wasn't much to write home about as a city.
52:05At least compared to Athens,
52:07Sparta seemed to be just a collection of villages.
52:11There was one thing these Spartans did better than anyone else,
52:15and that was warfare.
52:18From the earliest age, these Spartiates were trained in the arts of war.
52:23They knew better than anyone else in Greece
52:26how to defend their land and how to ravage other people's land.
52:31And when they did so, nobody could stand up to them.
52:36If the Spartans invaded,
52:38Athens could survive without the farmland of Attica,
52:41as the city-state was already importing much of its food
52:45through the Piraeus.
52:47Pericles knew, in times of crisis,
52:50the Athenians could fall back
52:52behind the long walls of the extended city.
52:56But this apparently well-devised defensive strategy
53:00had a fundamental flaw.
53:08The Kerameikos here is the biggest graveyard of ancient Athens,
53:12and it was near here, when they were excavating a new metro line,
53:15just back there, that they made an extraordinary discovery.
53:19Among the individual burials, there was an enormous pit
53:23full of skeletons, thrown in ram-jam without any ceremony,
53:28over 100 in number.
53:30They must be victims of the Great Plague.
53:34The Great Plague was the great flaw in Pericles' strategy.
53:40Pericles thought he could survive Spartan invasion
53:44by gathering the whole population within the long walls.
53:48It was, in fact, an effective strategy,
53:52but it had a big downside,
53:54and the downside was if you crammed people into the same space,
53:57they spread disease.
53:59A terrifying plague broke out, and we know about it in great detail
54:04because the historian Thucydides was one of its victims,
54:08and he tells us with medical precision how the plague was.
54:15Dr Manolis Papagrigorakis has been analysing new evidence
54:20of how the victims died.
54:22So Manolis Papagrigorakis has come
54:25with one of the skeletons he's studying.
54:28This is the head of a young girl.
54:3011 years old.
54:32Are you certain she suffered from the plague?
54:35Yes. How do you know?
54:51So, what are the symptoms of typhoid fever?
54:55How does someone die?
55:21Tragically, the plague's greatest casualty
55:25was the Athenian leader Pericles, a victim of his own strategy.
55:33It was the reliance on Athens' naval fortifications
55:37and water supply system, the pride of its civic infrastructure,
55:41which dealt a terrible blow to the city.
55:44But the idea which Pericles and his city had championed lives on.
55:50I think that that ideal of freedom is something we need to stick up for.
55:54We do in our city freedom of speech, freedom of association.
55:57These things are contested now.
55:59They are not accepted everywhere in the world.
56:02These are not trivial values.
56:04They are incarnated here in London, just as they were in England.
56:10The democratic values, which had been the hallmark of the ancient city,
56:14would finally crumble.
56:18But in the end, it was neither the plague nor the Spartans
56:22which proved Athens' final downfall.
56:28More than 300 miles north of Athens,
56:31the city of Athens was once again under siege.
56:35More than 300 miles north of Athens lay another Greek state.
56:43This is Pella, home of Philip II of Macedon
56:47and his son, Alexander the Great.
56:54Pella was the new capital of the Macedonian kingdom
56:58that defeated Athens.
57:01The defeat by Sparta knocked Athens back but did not bring her down.
57:07Her empire briefly revived.
57:10It was the defeat by Philip of Macedon at the Battle of Chaeronea
57:15that ended Athens' chances of being an imperial power.
57:23The Macedonian Empire enabled them to build cities on a scale
57:28that dwarfed Athens.
57:31Instead of small streets with egalitarian housing,
57:35they built great avenues and opulent mansions
57:39decorated with extravagant mosaics.
57:49But in terms of making cities work, they followed the Athenian example
57:54with public space, public water supply and public buildings.
58:00Across the Mediterranean, another city-state looked on admiringly.
58:06While the Athenians had set a new standard of urban living,
58:10it would take a much greater empire
58:13to create the world's first megacity by ancient standards.
58:17And that empire would be launched from a polis not in Greece but in Italy.
58:23Its name in Greek spelt strength, rome, Rome.